Losing Twitter Followers? See Why & How To Fix It
You’ve been cracking away and trying to get more Twitter followers, pouring countless days, weeks and months trying hard to move the needle but instead seeing the counter going up, you are losing Twitter followers?
Or maybe even the counter dropped suddenly?
In this article, you will learn:
- common reasons why you might be losing Twitter followers
- how you can prevent that from happening
- best practices to keep growing
But first, let’s clarify something…
Is Losing Twitter Followers normal?
Since you’ve built up a respectable follower count already, you’re most likely aware that people unfollow accounts for a variety of reasons and a small follower churn is completely normal and might happen to everyone.
Usually, it will happen when you stop posting and engaging with your followers.
If you notice that you are losing Twitter followers at a rapid pace, you’ll want to act quickly, as likely, this unnatural churn is caused by something else.
A falling follower count could affect your engagement which in turn could make it harder to gain followers back.
Preventing people from unfollowing you doesn’t have to be difficult, but unless you understand why they are unfollowing you, there isn’t much you can do to stop it.
The first thing you need to do when you notice your follower count falling is to take an honest look at your Twitter profile and identify the reason people are leaving.
We’ve outlined some of the common reasons why you might be losing Twitter followers.
Take a look at them and see whether or not you think any of these reasons apply to you.
Why Twitter Followers Decrease
Here are the most common reasons your Twitter followers are dropping:
- Twitter is removing fake followers
- you’re not posting enough
- your tweets are low quality
- you’re promoting yourself too hard
- you’re posting outside of your theme
- you purchased your followers
- it’s a Twitter glitch
Let’s go over each in more detail as well as list some solutions to help you recover and prevent losing followers in the future:
Twitter is removing Fake followers
Fake follower networks are getting to be something of a huge issue on Facebook and Twitter.
Naturally as these follower networks grow, Twitter will begin to start cracking down on these networks more, and this is usually done in large batches through changes to their algorithm and detection methods.
If you noticed you’ve been losing hundreds of followers overnight, very likely that might be Twitter taking on fake follower networks.
The moment Twitter’s anti-spam algorithm flags and suspends an Twitter account, it’s deducted from your follower counter as well (just like it never existed).
Twitter constantly fights with spam and bot networks and is known for doing a huge purge every couple of months, causing your follower counter dropping suddenly.
But cheer up - even though the counter decreasing, you will be getting better engagement rates per follower and your Twitter account stop being a ghost town.
Fake followers were never really followers anyways, so keep that in mind and keep making great content for your genuine followers.
Solution: Keep posting great content and seek to attract real engagement from real users. If your users were false, then you didn’t get much value from them in the first place.
Fake users won’t engage with your content, visit your website, or make a purchase.
All they were doing was inflating the number of followers that you had.
Which is not a value-add beyond what it provides to your ego.
Finally, make sure to not use apps and bots in order to grow following that might artificially inflate your numbers and engage with potential fake followers.
There is a lot of ways to get Twitter followers without bots, so I recommend you to look into them.
You’re not posting enough
There is a lot of content being posted to Twitter every day.
To stay relevant you need to be posting, at least every other day.
If you aren’t posting often people may not be able to engage with your posts when you do post.
Keeping a consistent posting schedule will help people recognise your content better and allow them to participate more frequently if they like the content you post.
You want to make sure that you are giving followers enough of what they want.
Otherwise, when you do post, you won’t see much engagement, and they might even decide that they’ve had enough of what you have had to show in their feed and choose to unfollow you.
Make the most of Twitter, and post often enough to make it worthwhile for your followers to follow your account.
Solution: Since Twitter is very fast-paced place, posting multiple times a day (about 3-4 times a day) is a good amount to aim for and completely normal.
If you are posting less than that, your tweets will seem sporadic, and it will be hard for you to connect with your followers.
Posting often enough will also be something that you want to test and change depending on the engagement that you get on your posts.
If you notice that posting more during the week results in less involvement you might try varying how you post.
Promoting enough for your audience is something that only you will understand, and you can realise through trial and error.
Bonus tip: To you can experiment with pinned Tweets. These are great for call to actions or important messages you want anyone landing on your Twitter profile to see.
Learn how to pin a tweet and implement it as soon as you can - boost of engagement, guaranteed.
Your tweets are low quality
Because Twitter is primarily a text platform, it’s important to keep your tweets short and sweet.
After all, on a platform that includes everything from world-class professionals, business owners, politicians, industry leaders and even regular folks with their own thoughts, who aren’t shy to express themselves.
If it’s not the quality of the tweets, it may be the message itself.
You want to make sure your tweet resonates with your audience.
Are you posting content that is likely to be shared among your Twitter ofllowers or that serves a purpose in your given niche? Or are you just posting generic tweets that you found somewhere else?
If your tweets are not unique and don’t represent the value that your subscribers originally signed up for you might see them decide to unfollow you.
Solution: Make sure your tweets are interesting and often spark conversation. At same time, make sure your tweets don’t become formulaic and boring.
You’re promoting yourself too hard
If you’re posting 20 times a day and your content is all about you - you might be posting too much.
If your content feels too much like self-promotion people might be put off.
How much after all, do you like it when brands post about deals they’re offering or products that they sell? Sure we like posts like that since we follow brands that post those things, but we don’t want them in our face multiple times a day from the same brand.
After a while, self-promotion can be tiresome, and your followers might decide to unfollow you if all you’ve done is post about yourself multiple times a day for the last month.
People have more choice than ever of who they follow on Twitter, and that makes it easy for them to unfollow people who are only interested in self-promotion.
Even people who are only interested in themselves make time to post about products and other types of things on Twitter.
You can make an effort as well. Post about more than just you.
Solution: Vary your content up and post about things that are relevant to your niche. If you make a point to post about topics that are trending in your niche but don’t necessarily involve your brand you may find that you’ll get more engagement than when you post about yourself.
You’re posting outside of your theme
If you’re posting outside of the subject that you or your brand are known for you might find that people who followed you for the content in that niche will unfollow you.
This might be ok if you only lose a few every once in a while, but if you start noticing a large group of followers jumping ship, you might want to be sure you aren’t straying from the path you laid down when you initially started your account.
Twitter has a wide variety of different subjects, and many people only like to follow people who are posting about specific topics.
You might find that people are more dedicated to just seeing what interests them than you might initially have thought.
Solution: Evaluate your content and make sure that you aren’t tweeting entirely outside of your theme.
A tweet here and there may be fine, but you certainly don’t want it to have a significant effect on your Twitter follower count.
If you still want to create the new content, evaluate whether or not you wish to change niches, or whether you need to start another account for the new tweet you want to post.
You purchased your followers
Besides the fact that purchased followers won’t drive you any engagement, clicks or sales, there is one more issue: sooner or later, they will be gone.
How? Either the service you bought followers from started pulling back all those follows (all at once or gradually) or Twitter already figured out what’s going on and started axing those fake followers.
Solution: stay away from this method. Purchasing followers might sound like a great way to boost your social proof in a short run but even for that it’s pretty easy for one to figure out your followers are not genuine.
It’s a Twitter glitch
At the end of the day, it could be just a glitch - Twitter had similar glitches in the past, resulting in Twitter followers disappearing from user accounts for hours and sometimes for whole days.
When it happens, usually there going to be news around the Internet so googling up “Twitter glitch” should give you an answer and confirm that this is indeed just a glitch.
Solution: Just wait. Once their team resolve the issue, you should see the follower numbers going back to their normal state. It might take sometimes a day or two so just be patient - eventually, you will see your followers back!
Final Thoughts on Losing Twitter Followers
Twitter has grown an enormous amount over the last few years, and this has meant that people are presented with a vast amount of choice with regards to who they choose to follow on the platform.
With that added choice comes more competition, and more noise on the platform that users will have to sort through to find the content that they like.
If they aren’t getting what they want from you, they can get it somewhere else.
If you notice that your follower count is dropping on Twitter, you’ll want to do something about it sooner rather than later.
Losing Twitter followers that you worked hard to acquire is not something anyone who has an Twitter profile wants to see.
There are a variety of ways to lose followers, but the good news is that almost always, you can identify what it is that you are doing to lose followers, and make the changes necessary to stop the flow of people out of your account.
No matter what is going on with your account, you should always be thinking of ways to maximise the value you are giving to your followers.
If you notice a drop in followers, it may be the perfect opportunity for you to re-evaluate your content strategy on the platform.
Who knows, you might even gain them back after making the changes.
Karen is a senior technical writer and copywriter here at GrowFollowing. Her area of expertize are social media apps and new media.