Twitter Limits Are Antisocial For Authors

The other day I tried to follow someone on Twitter and I couldn’t. It turns out I’d hit the ceiling set by Twitter. Apparently, you can only follow up to 2,000 people. Why is there a cap on social media? I thought the whole idea was to have limitless possibilities to connect, grow, and communicate. What a bummer.

Truth is I have no time to follow anyone. I don’t read the tweets of those I follow nor do I live on Twitter. I use it to help get traffic for my blog and to meet people. But I could never have the time or interest to read the thousands of daily tweets coming at me. 

I suppose the same can be said of those who follow me. How many actually read my tweets? I have around 1,600 followers. I tweet 7-8 times a day. Shouldn’t I have hundreds of clicks to my blog just from those who see me on twitter each day? It doesn’t work that way.

Social media is the new gym membership -- sign up for it but you don’t use it. Look at Google+ - how many fill out a profile and then let it go dormant? Or how many have a blog but haven’t posted to it in the past two months? For many, social media is a chore and a bore.

But if you’re going to invest and use social media to brand yourself, sell books, and build up your network, how dare Twitter limit the conversation? It’s ridiculous. Social media is a numbers game and if you can’t build your numbers up, you are stunted.

I already hate Gmail when it limits me to sending out 2,000 emails within a 24-hour period. Colleagues call it “Gmail jail” when we get locked out of sending emails.

We’re living in a click-currency world and if anything hampers our ability to get eyes on our names, books, tweets, videos, or posts we are injured by it. When there’s a cyber attack on the Internet or a blackout,  how will nay of us function in a dark world?

It seems strange that I can be up to 12,361 connections on LinkedIn but I can’t follow more than 2,000 on Twitter. I guess I need to form my own social media networking site. First rule: no rules. Connect all you want. Sell whatever you want. Use any language. Show naked photos. Let society police itself, otherwise we become closed and stagnated.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2013