Two Weeks in - API Write Bar!
So two weeks into my challenge to obtain 20,000 followers on Twitter within a year!
Current position
The follower count this week has increased from 508 to 1216!
So that's a gain of 708 over 7 days or 101 per day. This is good, as it exceeds the figure of 56 per day required to achieve the goal! At this rate the target should be achieved in just over half the time.
Breakdown per day
How has this follower increased worked out per day?
Clearly we are seeing some churn to our figures, as each day has seen a minimum of 101 new followers, which many days significantly higher, yet the average per day is only 101.
I will have to play with my home-grown code to see if I can track who leaves and see if there are any trends, so that I can keep the retention rate high.
How have we generated these followers?
This week we have changed the custom script to follow 3 new found profiles on each run (20 minute interval). Thereby following 216 accounts per day, so with an average per day growth of 101, it can be seen that the hit rate is just under 50%.
Problems this week
The custom script generates a "Thank You for following" tweet, for each 4 followers and was scheduled to set these at 12pm daily.
However this meant with a large number of followers, I was sending a maximum of 40 of these tweets during the runs that had the hour of 12pm, thereby resulting in 120 of these going out over lunchtime daily.
I think this may have annoyed a few of the followers resulting in them unfollowing the account.
Without the churn analytics this is only a guess. Churn analytics seems quite a high priority for the script.
This script has now been changed to send 1 tweet to the 4 new followers on the next run after it reaches 4 new followers, thereby reducing the amount of tweeting to 1 tweet per 20 minutes thanking followers, whilst this ultimately will result in the same number of tweets over a 24 period, it seems much more acceptable to my followers to drip feed it.
A similar problem would exist on a Friday with my Follow Friday tweets, so this has also been adjusted to do the same on a Friday. Any tweets not sent within this period will automatically be held over to the next Friday and become the first ones to go that week.
API Write Bar
Since 04.45 on 22 January Twitter has barred my API authorisation from writing, i.e. following new accounts, sending tweets etc.. I can still do searches etc., but it seriously curtails its function!
This has been picked up in my logfile:
I can only think that they have not liked the fact that I bulk sent a load of thank you tweets, due to the problem outlined above.
I have
contacted support and am awaiting a reply to get the API reinstated.
Meanwhile I can still work on other aspects of my script (that use read functionally) and also carry on with the actions I have been doing, but these will have to be on a manual basis - A right pain in the neck!
I do wish twitter would have better API documentation to allow people to understand ALL the limits before coding scripts, rather than barring accounts and then require you to beg to get it reinstated!
Hopefully they will action my request with minimal delay!
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!
