Seeing your Twitter follower count decrease can be a major warning sign. With tools such as Social Blade now available to monitor your online presence, users are alerted to even a slight dip in popularity. In this article, we take a look at the reasons why people may be unfollowing your account and what you can do to limit this as much as possible.
Major Updates At Twitter
Let’s start this list with a potential cause of follower loss that is completely out of your hands. Sometimes referred to as a ‘purge’ by professional social marketers, Twitter will occasionally identify and remove all of the spam accounts using their website. Since Twitter was created in 2006, they have average roughly 1 large purge per year which affects over 80% of their users. Main A-List celebrities tend to suffer the most, with Justin Bieber and Katy Perry losing nearly 3 million followers within a 24-hour period back in July of 2018.
Recently, in addition to deactivating spam accounts, Twitter has started to ‘lock’ accounts that they suspect might be breaking their terms of service. This is only a temporary state and when the user has signed back in and confirmed their phone number, they can use their account again as normal. In this instance, expect to see your follower count slowly increase over the next few days/weeks, although it is unlikely to reach the amount you had prior to the update. The following statement was given by Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO) regarding a ‘purge’ that happened midway through 2018:
This week we’ll be removing locked Twitter accounts (locked when we detect suspicious changes in behavior) from follower counts across profiles globally. The number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down. #health https://t.co/JGmE4ofoZ2
— jack (@jack) July 11, 2018
Changes To Your Content
If you have started posting different content recently, you can expect an immediate decrease in follower count that should trail off as time passes. This happens if people are no longer interested in the content you are posting and don’t want to see it on their timeline. If you want to rebrand your Twitter (Perhaps to post memes or enter giveaways), it might be worth creating a brand-new account.
Profile Edits
Sometimes changing your account may result in a follower loss too, especially when it comes to your username, display name or profile picture. If people no longer recognize your account, they are likely to unfollow when they come across your tweets on their home feed.
Frequency Of Your Posts
The amount you tweet is vital to the growth of any account – however, finding the sweet spot can prove to be a difficult and time-consuming task. Tweeting too much can put you at risk of flooding people’s timelines, while not tweeting enough leads to an inactive and unresponsive audience. The only real way to find the optimal frequency for your profile is through trial and error, or by closely paying attention to other accounts that seem to have positive growth (Don’t copy their scheduling too strictly however, as your content could potentially be ‘buried’ by theirs).
That concludes our list on why you may be losing followers on Twitter. We hope at least one of these tips has proved useful and can be applied to your account in the future!
