LOS ANGELES—Just in time for Friday the 13th, Twitter has one of their biggest Twitter purges in history. On Wednesday, Twitter decided to purge locked accounts from people’s follower count, though most people felt the effect this morning.
A locked account is an account that has been demonstrating suspicious behavior. Either your account has been compromised, aka hacked, or you have a strange login location, or you have been automating too much, or you have some behavior that might be a violation of the community guidelines but it is not enough to warrant a suspension. These accounts are still publicly visible but are not tweeting until the account has been unlocked. A suspended account has violated the community guidelines or TOS and is not visible until, or if, the suspension is lifted.
There are tens of millions of locked accounts that have been sitting on Twitter, doing nothing but counting towards your overall Twitter follower count. Twitter is now purging these accounts.
The good thing is that these are inactive accounts. So they do not interact with you. They do not click, or retweet, or buy. These accounts are nothing but a number in your follower total. Purging these accounts means the ones left are accounts that should be live and active…or at least live. We all know there are lots of accounts on Twitter that lurk instead of tweet.
The hits started yesterday as people saw HUGE drops in their follower counts, but most people took the big hit overnight. As people logged into their Twitter account this morning, many people saw dramatic drops. How is that for a Friday the 13th Surprise?
Likely we will see swings in following as the bot networks get back to making their bots. We are already seeing some strange followers coming online with private accounts that have very few tweets. But that is to be expected as the army of the bots are rebuilt. However, as devastating as this is to our vanity numbers, it is great for weeding out the useless accounts.
If you have any questions on how to start building up your follower numbers after the purge, get in touch, and 7 Veils can help.
