Everybody on Twitter wants to get more followers – anyone who says otherwise must either by lying or a bot. Brands and businesses especially use the platform to get exposure with as many existing and potential customers as possible. It helps them generate awareness about their product and create a buzz around their name.

Getting those numbers up is no easy feat and seeing a decline in your follower count can be disheartening. To help you come up with a more effective strategy for retaining followers, here we run down some of the potential reasons why you are getting unfollowed on Twitter.

Are you committing any of these Twitter sins? Keep reading to learn more, find out how you can fix the situation, and stop losing followers.

1. Not Holding Up Your End of the Bargain

People follow accounts on social media for a reason, and those who don’t hold up their end of the bargain risk being unfollowed. If you say you will tweet about a specific topic, be sure to follow through because this is what people are following your account for.

Consistently providing your followers with what they want, for a long period of time, is a great way to gain their loyalty. Veer away from what you promised and you risk losing a significant portion of them.

Take an inventory of what you’ve been tweeting out for the past couple of months and see if it’s aligned with your image. Overall, make sure you are providing your followers with valuable content that will make their lives better in some way.

2. Hateful Conduct

Nobody likes a bully – especially not on Twitter. If you have a history of hateful conduct, you not only risk losing your hard-earned followers but also being booted off the platform completely.

Twitter users are quick to police accounts that are notorious for bullying and being hateful towards other users. It’s become a pretty major trend, and you don’t want to become their next target.

Brands and businesses can’t afford to engage in any type of hateful behavior on the platform. Doing so could end with them gaining a disdainful reputation, on and off Twitter.

Remember this poor attempt at a joke, which got Justine Sacco in a lot of hot water?

A tweet like this can generate a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons. Being internet famous is not always a good thing and such is the case for Justine Sacco, a London-based PR consultant. She made headlines for making such a hateful remark, costing her the reputation she had built, her followers, her job, and even her dating life.

What you tweet and how you tweet says a lot about yourself, and if you are being hateful towards others, you can stop guessing why those numbers are going down. Twitter is no place for bullies – and neither is the rest of the world.

3. You Bought Low-Quality Followers

Buying followers is a fast and efficient way to increase your social proof and reach more authentic users. When done right, buying followers can be a great way to get those numbers up.

Sign up with the wrong provider, on the other hand, and you could look bad if someone decides to give your sudden rise in popularity a good look. Cheap providers who offer low-quality followers don’t pay attention to how their followers look. These fake followers can be spotted from a mile away.

 

Often referred to as “eggheads,” these accounts typically use generic avatars, have empty bios, and 0 tweets on their feed. You can also end up with NSFW followers.

In hindsight, these bot followers may seem harmless. While they do a good job in boosting someone’s social proof by artificially increasing their follower count, someone who has a reputation to keep might want to veer away from them.

Brands and businesses risk being accused of manipulating their popularity on the platform by purchasing cheap, low-quality followers. This can potentially turn off authentic users – causing them to unfollow.

On top of all that, someone who purchases cheap, crappy followers also risks contaminating their real followers with spammy content, which some of these fake accounts are notorious for sending out.

While spammy content is usually just annoying, sometimes you risk exposure to online dangers, such as phishing, that can have devastating results to one’s security.

High-quality followers are what you want if you are keen on keeping a pristine reputation. These users have unique bios that usually seem as real as an authentic user. They will help you strengthen your social proof without compromising your situation.

Find out which providers can supply you with the best quality followers by checking out the detailed reviews on our website. We put each provider to the test to make sure you can make the best decisions for your campaign.

4. You Don’t Tweet Anymore

Abandoning your Twitter account is a fast way to lose all of your followers. Having a feed that looks like a ghost town can lead people to believe you are no longer in business. They’d want to unfollow inactive accounts to avoid any sort of confusion when trying to look up something.

An abandoned Twitter feed isn’t a good look to have for anyone. You can’t expect people to keep following you if you don’t give them any reason to be there.

People are on Twitter to sink their teeth into interesting content they can’t get anywhere else. If you can’t provide them with that and resort to abandoning your Twitter account completely, you give them no reasons to stay.

Comic legend Dave Chappelle was able to turn things around with a humorous tweet about his barren Twitter feed. While not all of us can get away with such a move, Dave knew that abandoning his Twitter account made him miss out on an opportunity to connect with fans from around the world.

Keeping your Twitter alive and active is your best bet in retaining your followers – and also gaining some more along the way.

5. You Follow and then Unfollow Shortly After

The follow and unfollow method is one of the oldest tricks in the book – the growth hack book, that is. While this is a perfectly valid method of acquiring more followers, not everyone is thrilled with the idea of being unfollowed.

What is the follow-unfollow method? It’s when you follow other accounts, expecting a follow back. If they don’t follow you back soon, you unfollow them and move on to the next target. Sounds innocent enough, right?

Call it the rule of reciprocity, but people don’t like being unfollowed. While it may be effective for rapidly increasing your follower count, it will only take time before people start picking up on your technique. This can make you look opportunistic – and we all know that’s not a good look, even on social media.

If you want a more effective method of getting your numbers up, try to be more selective with the people you follow.

Try to come up with a detailed buyer persona to help you target the people who will benefit from the type of content you have to offer. This can help you find qualified leads and garner a better shot at higher-quality follow-backs.

6. You Spam People

Spamming people is a big no-no. It makes it hard for others to get to your important updates and saturates your feed with content of little or no value. One of the fastest ways to be the most hated person on Twitter is by spamming others.

Spam on Twitter is a good way to get that follower count to nil – so if you want to keep your followers, don’t spam! There are a number of ways you can put out content and bring attention to your account without having to resort to this slimy maneuver.

According to Buffer, it’s wise to post up to 14 tweets a day but never more than once per hour. It’s important that you space tweets fairly evenly and strategize ahead so you won’t be mistaken for spamming.

Using a social media scheduler is also very useful for mapping out your tweets for the day, or even for a week, without having to actually sit down every hour to post something.

7. Posting Way Too Much

Posting way too many updates is just like spamming – only with good intentions, making it a bit more innocent.

Remember, you never want to be the person saturating everybody’s feed. That’s just annoying. Space your updates evenly and make sure everything you put out is noteworthy, something that’s actually worth looking at.

Being selective about your updates can help you maintain the quality of your feed and followers. A too-frequent posting schedule can affect the quality of your content because you’ll feel pressured to come up with content just for the sake of posting more frequently.

If you want to keep your followers engaged (and also keep them from unfollowing), focus on the quality of your content and less on the frequency. Quality always trumps quantity, even on a platform like Twitter.

8. You Are Overselling

Overselling on Twitter can also contribute to your declining follower count. In this digital age, people go to platforms such as Twitter to seek answers and solutions to some of their immediate problems.

In short, people are after quality content that can make their lives a little better – in one way or another. Focusing on advertising your products and services can help you gain mileage at first but if that’s all you do on Twitter, people will start treating you like a commercial and begin looking elsewhere for answers.

LinkedIn is a popular social networking site among professionals, and they use Twitter to provide prompt assistance to their users. Aptly named LinkedIn Help, they use Twitter to answer questions that users have regarding their services.

Aside from providing customer support, they also tweet out valuable content that resonates in the right spectrum for professionals looking to advance their careers.

This is why people flock to LinkedIn and LinkedIn Help – because they get something they can’t get anywhere else. Because they provide such amazing service to their users, they can spend less on advertising their services. The good rep they’ve built up on Twitter does a lot of legwork for them.

Maintain Success by Staying Awesome

Nobody wants to lose followers. Invest your energy in developing a campaign that is not only beneficial to you but also to your following.

Avoiding the mistakes mentioned above is your best bet for keeping as many of your followers as possible – and gaining a whole lot more.

Making a name for yourself on a competitive platform like Twitter is no easy feat. Maintain good tweeting behavior and you are sure to impress and gain the loyalty of even the most discerning Twitterati.

Remember, you can boost your following, as well as your social proof, by purchasing Twitter followers, likes, and retweets. Just go with one of the top providers on our list, and you’ll be getting high-quality followers that will improve your reputation.

Ready to keep all of your followers? Just follow our advice and you’ll be well on your way to success!