Follower drops on Twitter is always a headache for users. One day, you are enjoying 10,000 followers, only to go down to 8000 the next. This can be particularly frustrating for those trying to establish a solid presence on the platform.

There are a variety of reasons why your followers would start unfollowing and disappearing. In this article, I will examine these reasons, how you can deal with them, and how you can bounce back from these drops.

Explaining the big Twitter follower drops

Major drops, such as when you start seeing your follower numbers go down by the hundreds in just days, would deeply concern anyone. One of the likely reasons for such large drops is that most of the followers you lose are bots.

You should already be aware that Twitter dislikes bot accounts, and has made a considerable effort to remove them from its platform. Just recently, the site deleted more than 70 million fake accounts in the last few months. Even celebrities were not spared by these purges.

Websites that sell low-quality followers are a common source of bot accounts. They create these bots en masse and sell them cheap to users wanting to make their accounts look more popular quickly.

Even if you did not purchase bot accounts from shady followers, they can still create problems for you. These bots are designed to follow thousands of accounts at a time. As such, they can end up swarming your account without you noticing. Then when they get deleted, you will surely see the drop in what you thought were actual followers.

How to avoid big drops in Twitter followers

If you are purchasing Twitter followers for the purpose of boosting your account, the best way to avoid big drops in your numbers is by choosing the right provider. Before making your purchase, review the quality of followers that a provider offers.

You want high-quality ones that have complete profile pictures and bios, as well as a good level of activity. These followers are less prone to being marked by Twitter as fake accounts and deleted. Check out our list of providers to find out which ones have the best-quality followers that you can get.

Proactively cleaning your followers list is another important step in protecting yourself from big drops. Tools like Twitter Audit are useful for quickly going through your list and determining how many of them are possibly bots.

From there, proceed to review your follower list and weed out the worst ones. This will cause your numbers to drop, but the payoff is that you get to maintain the quality of your account.

Other causes of large Twitter follower drops

Another factor which you must be aware of is that Twitter followers can leave you very quickly when you say the wrong thing on Twitter. In today’s sensitive political landscape, people can leave you very quickly if you say something which is considered politically incorrect, not in line with their religious views, or something was just plain taken the wrong way. Many celebrities have experienced this:

Roseanne Barr for her racist tweet .

Kathy Griffin for her a depiction of cutting off the president’s head .

Gwyneth Paltrow for her N***** in Paris tweet .

The examples can go on, but the thing that you need to think about is whether or not you have said something that has caused your followers to drop. Sometimes, it is all your fault.

Roseanne Barr on racist tweet: ‘I wish I worded it better’ https://t.co/Aw9XoCyM1o pic.twitter.com/CLvoXPWSno — Page Six (@PageSix) July 27, 2018

Worded it better… Right.

Bouncing back from Twitter follower drops

If you have a sizable following on Twitter, and the drop doesn’t eat a significant portion of that number, you can easily bounce back. After all, the large number of followers that remain is a good indicator that you are still popular. That will help you gain new followers again quickly.

Using the same high-quality follower providers mentioned above will also help you recover from the drop. Be careful when boosting your account this way as you don’t want it to backfire and cause you to lose more followers. A steady flow of small follower purchases works better than one big burst.

Smaller, subtle Twitter follower drops

While a massive drop in followers can scare you, a steady decrease in followers over time can also be alarming. This steady decline is an indicator that you followers are gradually losing interest in you.

Ah, I've entered the "follow-back pullback" phase of this follower surge. Whenever a couple thousand new followers show up, a certain small percentage of them only stick around to see if the get a follow back. So you hit a new high water mark, followed by a small drop. — Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) March 6, 2018

There are various reasons why this can happen. Even something seemingly simple like you not following them back can cause people to unfollow, as shown by the above tweet. Keep in mind that following back is often seen as an acknowledgement of their presence. Not doing this will dishearten some fans, causing them to leave.

However, there is another side to this. Some users will purposely follow thousands of accounts in the hopes of gaining at least a few hundred new followers. Once they gain those, they will unfollow all the accounts that they followed and start all over again.

There are other typical reasons why you would see small-scale follower drops. Some of your followers might simply have closed their accounts. A few could also have been banned for various reasons. These causes are unavoidable and thus should be treated as a normal part of running your Twitter account.

Content-related drops in followers

A steady decline in your follower numbers could also be related to what you actually do on Twitter. Posting low-quality content is one way that can lead your Twitter audience to slowly unfollow. Remember that most of your followers are there because they are interested in what you are posting. If they don’t get that, they lose interest and drop out.

LOL followers drop after tweeting about report submitting.

I get it: report writing is dull. But it's what one does when one runs a museum. — Lisa Buckley, PhD 🦃🐾🐾 (@Lisavipes) November 25, 2016

Doing excessive promotions is another sure way to cause your followers to leave. Even if you represent a major brand, being too salesy in your tweets can easily turn them off. That means you lose the very people that you want to promote to in the first place.

Being inactive for some time will also cause your Twitter audience to unfollow. Note that many of the people who unfollow for this reason are the ones that regularly visit your page. You end up losing a valuable section of your audience base just by not posting for a long time.

Dealing with small scale Twitter follower drops

The best way of lessening small-scale follower drops is by maintaining a good level of activity for your account. Some of the steps you can undertake are:

Increasing tweet frequency: Posting at least 15 tweets a day is a good baseline for keeping your followers interested in your Twitter page.

Tweeting throughout the day: You can even tweet outside of working hours to better engage your audience.

Using scheduling tools: Tools like Hootsuite will let you schedule hundreds of tweets in advance to keep your account continuously updated.

These simple steps will let you make your Twitter activity more consistent to maintain the interest of current followers and attract new ones.

Ensuring that you have good content to deliver to your audience is also essential to keep them from getting bored. Come up with a variety of content that will be as informative as it is entertaining. Keep these content relevant to better get them to respond.

Actively engage your followers to further keep them invested in your account. You don’t have to follow back every one of your followers, but you should acknowledge their presence. Responding to mentions and messages is an effective way to way to do this. This also generates conversations with them, which encourages them to stay. While you can’t do that for everyone, those that you do directly engage with can help in attracting more followers to your page by sharing positive comments about you.

Keep your Twitter followers following

As you can see, followers dropping off on Twitter isn’t really a cut and dry issue. There are many reasons that can lead to your numbers dropping. But you can deal with these drops in different ways, like:

Cleaning up your followers list: Be proactive in removing bots and other undesirable accounts on your account to mitigate the effects of Twitter purges.

Creating high-quality content: Keep your followers invested in you by posting engaging content in a consistent schedule.

Being ready to adapt: Keep up to date with any changes that Twitter makes on its platform and determine how these will affect your follower number.

These steps not only lessen the effects for follower drops but also help keep your numbers growing. Don’t let big losses discourage you, you will always be able to bounce back if you know how. For help right now with a follower drop, see our list of the Top Twitter Providers right now!