Three weeks in ahead of target!

Three weeks in ahead of target!

Three weeks into my challenge to obtain 20,000 followers on Twitter within a year, and I am ahead of target.
So as can be seen from the screenshot, I am currently standing at 1695 followers.  Last week this figure was 1216, so that is a gain of 479 over the last 7 days.
This is an average gain of 68 per day.  Still above the target figure of 56 required to reach the target.

Reduction in follow rate

Week 2's average daily follow rate was 101 per day, so it is disappointing that week 3 has seen a 30% reduction!
The daily new follow graph also shows a similar trend:
The average figures is markedly down from that of the previous week.

What's caused the reduction

At the end of week 2's update I reported that Twitter had imposed a write-bar on my custom script.
This was a major setback as I was using this script to follow people - without the ability to follow, it seriously hampered the number of follows I got back.
Late on Monday evening the bar was lifted but only upon my agreement that I would not auto-follow anymore.
As I don't want a complete script ban for this account I had to respect this and therefore come up with a different method.
As my people to follow search was giving good follow back results I did not want to lose this, so decided that rather than auto-follow I will write all the users to a list, and then use the normal Twitter application to follow these accounts manually.
At the same time the accounts will be manually removed from the list.
Yes, it is much more manual clicking, but I feel this will yield good results.

Further write-ban!

On Tuesday morning I woke up to find that my script had been blocked from writing again!
So that curtailed my list idea again.
A further support request was sent to Twitter and it seems that they viewed it was sending too many tweets with @mentions.
This was because I was also auto-thanking new followers and these had built up in a queue when the script was blocked!
The ban was finally lifted on Wednesday evening.
This in effect meant I lost 3 full days of my challenge.
Taking this into account the daily figure would be nearer 120, therefore beating week two.
Hopefully there will be no further breaks in service and we can see week four exceeding all expectations!

Social network that does not like social!

When my account was blocked for the large number of @mentions I asked Twitter what the limit is so that I could ensure I kept under it!
They responded that there was no set limit and that I should severely limit the number sent.
It therefore seems that Twitter is a social network that does not like people being social!

So what now

Please keep checking back to this blog on a weekly basis and see how well I am progressing with my quest to gain 20,000 twitter followers in a year!

I intend to post to this blog each Friday evening (GMT timezone).

Don't forget to follow @TwentykFollow on Twitter and tell all your friends to do the same!

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you back here soon!

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