If you’re a daily Twitter user you may have recently noticed a slight decrease in your follower count or saw a tweet from a big name on Twitter reporting a significant decrease in their followers. Some top celebrity accounts are even seeing their follower count reduced by over a million.

Although this sudden drop in followers may come as a shock for some big name users, the move is ultimately a good thing. The accounts that are being removed are inactive, meaning they were originally set up by a real person but have since become locked temporarily or permanently due to suspect behaviour. It is also good to note, that these accounts are not being completely removed from Twitter, just from their followers’ accounts.

The move by Twitter is in response to their new focus on the company’s “controversial health”. Earlier this year, the Twitter CEO said the company would be searching for ways to root out trolling, bullying, hate speech, and political manipulation on the network. In order to do that, they were beginning to look for ways to better understand the nature, or “health,” of conversations on its platform. The company have now began to take active steps forward to develop an actual system metric to measure the health of the platform and ‘clean it up’ to ensure it can continue to grow in a positive direction.

The recent events of this week’s inactive follower purge, as well in May and June Twitter suspended 70 million suspected spam and bot accounts, is showing measures are actually being put in to place to begin to combat some of the serious problems the platform are facing. Overall, the update will remove tens of millions of accounts from follower numbers across the platform and impact around 6% of its users.

Whether or not you will are impacted has mostly to do with how many followers you have, and most of us will only see a very small difference, if any at all.

It’s hopeful and a big positive to see social media platforms formally putting health measures in place to improve their platform activity and encouraging to see the changes beginning to happen. If you would like to discuss social media and it’s benefits for your company and hear about our Social Media service, please be in touch with us at, [email protected]. If you liked this story and would like to hear more like it, you can also sign up to our monthly newsletter — directionforward.com/news