Free Twitter Followers

Even if you’ve been following social media marketing for even a short period of time I’m sure you’ve stumbled upon relatively new Twitter accounts with little content (not many Tweets) and over 1,000 followers: some with over 10,000 followers.

It’s clear their Twitter followers are not following due to the amazing Tweets and user interaction, how do they generate this level of Twitter follower growth, how do they get 500 followers, 1,000 followers, 5,000 followers let alone 10,000+ followers and do they get thousands of Twitter followers for free?

Before we start with how to get 1,000 Free Twitter Followers, below are two of my Twitter accounts, I followback most Twitter users: as long as your Twitter profile isn’t adult/porn and you have a Twitter profile image and biography I’ll probably followback for free: be patient, I get very busy with paid SEO work.

How to Get Free Twitter Followers

Optimize your Twitter profile.

It might be obvious, but take sometime and effort optimizing your Twitter profile.

That means add a Twitter Header image, Twitter profile photo, Twitter biography, and consider what your Twitter display name looks like. A display name like David Cameron Law (that’s my full name for my personal Twitter account @DavidLaw) is good, a display name like DavidLaw345/@DavidLaw345 isn’t so good, the latter example looks like a Twitter bot!

The above is basic Twitter optimization to maximise Twitter follower growth, I won’t even follow a Twitter profile which lacks a Twitter profile photo and Twitter biography.

How do New Twitter Accounts Get so Many New Followers Quickly?

There’s multiple ways to achieve fast Twitter follower growth including buying Twitter followers (clearly not free), but almost all of the REALLY fast follower growth techniques run the risk of Twitter account suspension/ban!

Assuming you don’t have a Twitter profile with viral growth (you aren’t a celebrity like Donald Trump where 1,000 Free Twitter followers a day is normal, no one cares who you are or what your business is doing) there’s two basic approaches to building 10,000+ Twitter followers for free quickly.

1. Follow a decent number of accounts daily including ones which follow your profile first, unfollow accounts which don’t followback after X days: this is cost free and low risk if done well.

2. Follow lots of accounts daily, unfollow ALL profiles after X days: this is aggressive Twitter churn and is VERY, VERY high risk.

Aggressive Twitter Follow Churn

Twitters definition of What is aggressive follow churn?

If you decide to follow someone and then change your mind later, you can just visit the person’s profile page and unfollow them. Aggressive follow churn is when a Twitter user repeatedly follows and then unfollows a large number of accounts to gain thousands of followers for free quickly. This may be done to get lots of people to notice them, to circumvent a Twitter limit, or to change their follower-to-following ratio. These behaviors negatively impact the Twitter experience for other people, are common spam tactics, and may lead to account suspension.

I’ve not tested aggressive Twitter follow churn techniques (I hate to waste my time), but have seen many examples of Twitter profiles using highly aggressive Twitter follower churn techniques and long-term they tend to get suspended/banned.

With even basic research it’s very easy to find those who manage dozens of Twitter accounts complaining about profiles being suspended/banned for aggressive follower growth techniques: they expect a % of their accounts to be banned!

I was tracking a large set of Twitter profiles (dozens of accounts) obviously owned by one person or one group: all linked to the same domain and all used the same aggressive Twitter follower churn growth technique.

Some of the profiles were in the tens of thousands of Twitter followers range while they only followed around 2,000 Twitter profiles. The accounts were growing faster than my Twitter accounts and it was obvious they were using aggressive Twitter follow churn. They have ALL being banned by Twitter and load the Twitter account suspended notification!

Account suspended
This account has been suspended. Learn more about why Twitter suspends accounts, or return to your timeline.

It looked like all the banned Twitter profiles were automatically following a large number of new followers every day (i’d guess they followed well over 500 Twitter accounts a day) and automatically unfollowing them all (including the profiles which followed back!) a day or two later while keeping the number of accounts they followed to ~2,000.

This is the definition of aggressive Twitter follow churn and Twitter banned them all: all that work down the drain!

That’s acceptable for people with dozens/hundreds of Twitter accounts with an automated Tweet, follow/unfollow systems who expect a % of bans, but a serious business cannot take risks with their main Twitter profile!

With this sort of risky technique getting 1,000 free Twitter followers a week would be easy, BUT if you care about your Twitter profile do NOT use aggressive follow techniques to get thousands of free Twitter followers. You might get away with it for months and build an account with over 10,000 Twitter followers, but the risks are too high and there’s no value in a suspended Twitter account with tens of thousands of followers!

Basically the really fast growth is due to taking big risks, if you want super fast Twitter growth, but don’t have an account that’s likely to go viral it means big risks. Don’t do it.

Free Twitter Follow Tip: Find Twitter profiles in your niche which get new followers everyday, their newest followers followed the account today, they are actively engaged following other Twitter users, if you follow Twitter users who followed an account today there’s a much higher probability they will follow you back.

Low Risk Free Twitter Follower Growth Techniques

I use a derivative of technique 1 above: “Follow a decent number of profiles daily including ones which follow your account first, unfollow accounts which don’t followback after X days: this is low risk if done well.”

I try to login to each Twitter account everyday: yes it’s very time consuming to manage multiple profiles and regularly fail to check them all. It doesn’t cost any money (it’s free), but that doesn’t mean it’s not work.

If anyone tells you success is easy, they are probably lying to sell you something to make THEM successful! Of course there’s an element of luck, but true success is almost always built on hard work.

I make a note of the date, the time and how many Twitter users I’m currently following: this is important to stop accidentally following too many Twitter profiles over a 24hr period: it’s VERY easy to lose track.

• I follow MOST Twitter users who follow an account back.
• I avoid following users without a profile image or biography.
• I avoid following adult/porn accounts.
• I avoid following profiles in languages I don’t understand.
• I avoid following accounts which SPAM.

Including following back I follow in total around 200 Twitter profiles over a 24hr period: I used to follow around 300, but Twitter have ‘tightened’ it’s algorithms in 2019/2020 resulting in more frequent account locks. If it’s a new profile I start slowly following under 50 accounts on day one and slowly work up to 200: free Twitter follower growth is a marathon not a sprint.

Free Twitter Follow Tip: Avoid following so many Twitter accounts in a short period of time you get the Twitter Notification : You are unable to follow more people at this time.

Why Limit Twitter Following to 200 Accounts a Day?

As of March 2019: “Every Twitter account is able to follow up to 400 accounts per day. Verified Twitter accounts are able to follow up to 1,000 accounts per day.”

So technically Twitter accounts can follow between 400 and 1,000 accounts over a 24hr period, all because you CAN follow 400 to 1,000 Twitter accounts everyday does not mean you SHOULD follow anywhere near 1,000 a day: long-term the account will be banned.

I limit following to around 200 Twitter users a day in 2020 because when I’ve followed 300 or more Twitter profiles in a day an account is far more likely to be temporarily locked requiring the password resetting or phone verification to regain access to the account.

Twitter Follow Tip: with this lower daily follow limit don’t waste your time following popular Twitter accounts found by looking at popular hashtags. You’ll find accounts which rank high for the Twitter hashtag algorithm (like being listed top 20 for the #SEO hashtag) are highly unlikely to follow back.

Having an account locked isn’t the end of the world, I’ve had a politics profile locked because I was arguing with people over Twitter and it got heated. When an account needs phone verification there’s a notice on the profiles home page warning other users there’s a possible problem AND there’s the risk the account will be ghost banned for 24hrs from AFTER the account is unlocked: a ghost banned account will appear NOT to be following any accounts while ghost banned and this tends to result in a peak in unfollowing.

When ghost banned the account tends to lose rather than gain Twitter followers, so having a profile temporarily locked should be avoided! Most of my Twitter profiles (some as old as 2010) have never been locked and I’ve never had an account suspended/banned, following 200 users a day in my experience works well in 2020 (very low risk and free).

A good Twitter follow tip is avoid doing anything which results in your profile being locked, keep your account in good standing so it’s always available to all Twitter users who might be interested in following it.

Should I Automate Twitter Following/Unfollowing?

There’s plenty of Twitter tools to automate tasks like mass following/unfollowing/Tweeting, some free, many paid, but be aware of the Twitter account limitations and terms of service.

Be VERY careful, you could risk your Twitter profile. There’s not much point building a Twitter account to millions of impressions a month to lose it all due to taking a silly risk!

Twitter TOS Says No Following/Unfollowing Automation

First limitation is you aren’t supposed to use automated tools to mass follow or mass unfollow, so using them in the first place means your Twitter account could be suspended/banned (it’s a small risk). That being said if you are very, very careful and use the tools in a conservative manner that mimics manual Twitter account management, you should be fine.

If using a Twitter management tool avoid doing anything which doesn’t look ‘normal’.

Lets take an extreme example that’s not ‘normal’: to manually mass follow 1,000 (technically you can follow 1,000 Twitter accounts a day) and unfollow 500 profiles (there’s no daily limits on mass unfollowing) everyday requires clicking the follow buttons 1,000 times and the unfollow button 500 times! Since the 2019 Twitter design update it takes 2 clicks to unfollow, so it’s now 1,000 clicks to unfollow 500 accounts!

If a person can click a Twitter follow button every second, to click 1,500 times will take just 25 minutes. Not many people are going to spend 25 minutes everyday manually clicking the follow/unfollow buttons!

Automated Twitter tools can achieve 1,500 clicks anywhere from seconds to hours (depends on the tool/options set), use the automated tool without taking into account normal human behaviour and it’s obvious to the Twitter automated tracking system you are using an automated Twitter tool and if you keep hitting their built in limits (like the following 1,000 accounts a day) your account will be suspended/banned.

Second limitation is Twitter has limits. See Twitter Following rules and best practices.

Few select quotes from the Twitter Following rules and best practices article:

We don’t limit the number of followers you can have. However, we do monitor how aggressively accounts follow other accounts. We try to make sure that none of our limits restrain reasonable usage, and will not affect most people on Twitter.

We don’t know for sure what Twitter considers reasonable usage, since they limit each account to following 400 (for unverified) and 1,000 (for verified) accounts a day we know for sure it’s below 400/1,000 new follows a day, but how close to 400/1,000 each day can you go?

In my experience a new account can run into problems (locked out requiring phone verification) in the early days even from following a couple of hundred accounts a day! Older unverified accounts with 5,000+ followers seem to be safe at following 200 accounts a day, going above 300 appears to be where the risks increase significantly.

I look at it this way, social media management is part of a long-term business strategy, NOT a quick set it up once and forget about it (managing Twitter takes time). If an account can gain just 50 new free Twitter followers everyday (without fail), that’s over 18,000 new followers a year. If you are willing to put the time/effort into account management breaking above 50 new followers every day is not a difficult task: for example I put more time into Twitter management and my personal Twitter profile increased from ~7,000 followers to over 22,000 followers in under 2 months with no problems at all (no lockouts) for free (I’ve never paid for Twitter followers).

Please note that Twitter does not permit any automated or bulk following or unfollowing behavior. Please review our Automation rules and best practices for more information on automating your account.

Are there additional limits if you are following 5000+ accounts?

The rules about aggressive following and follow churn still apply. In addition, every user can follow 5000 people total. Once you’ve followed 5000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following.

Free Twitter Follower Growth Conclusion

Gaining free Twitter followers is easy, but takes time, yes you can try to rush building a Twitter account very fast, but it’s safer to take a methodical approach to avoid the risks of Twitter account suspension/ban!

Given time you can easily build a Twitter profile with over 10,000 followers for free without risking the account.

Good Luck…

David Law

David Law : Technical SEO Expert with 20+ years Online Business, SEO, Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing experience... Creator of multiple WordPress SEO Themes and SEO Plugins. Interests: wildlife, walking, environmental issues, politics, economics, journalism, consumer rights.

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