twitter help
 

ok lets say you have 5000 followers, and you are following 5000. I have noticed that everytime i follow more, i lose followers. is it that these really big pages follow you for a while and then unfollow, just to gain a follower?

absolutely. Some use bots, I think some manually follow and unfollow. Some bots like and retweet stuff.

I retweeted a pic of Casey Calvert naked with a tennis racket and a mainstream twitter account on tennis retweeted it. Silly bots. I mark my tweets NSFW, So hopefully any kids following that twitter account didn't see anything.

There are other reasons people would unfollow as well.

Bots most likely or followers who don't like something you post so they unfollow, or if you are too spammy sometimes (too many tweets too fast) they may unfollow.

I don't think the big names would be going through unfollowing people after following them for a while. Compared with many of my friends I'm small at 96.5K but even for me it would be nearly impossible to keep track of this type of stuff. Going through the interactions or mentions can be a very time consuming task.

Possibly they use some sort of automated app to follow for a while, then after so many days unfollow. That's possible.

Try following people (big account's followers) instead.