How many people should I follow on Twitter at any one time?

• I loved your recent seoINsites.com video on Twitter. You say to follow 50 people a day. How selective should I be? How long should it take? It seems like it took me 45 minutes and I only got 25.

Answer: 45 minutes for 25 followers is pretty good (especially for a first effort). The more selective you are initially, the better quality you will get for the long-term.

To clarify, following 50 people per day is for when you're just starting out. After your following starts to grow you can increase that number. If you recall in the video (available here for seoINsites.com members), we mentioned that you don't want to follow more than 150% of your total following at any one time.

As an example, if you're up to 1000 followers, you can safely be following a maximum of 1500 at any one time.

It's also important to note that Twitter has a published limit of 2000 suggested followers. They believe this is the reasonable upper limit for the number of people an average person can follow at any one time. This is usually enough for the average Twitter user. However, these limits only apply after unreciprocated follow attempts reach the thousands.

You can avoid these Twitter limits by not following too aggressively. If you try to follow 1000 people and only 10 follow you back, this can be seen very easily by those you attempt to follow in the future. Not only will these future Tweeters not follow you back but they may block you completely thinking you might be a Twitter spammer. You definitely don't want that.

A great tool you can use to automate those you want to follow and free up a ton of your time is Twollo.com. Input the keywords that are relevant to your target audience and Twollo will track and auto-follow all Tweeters that are acti...