Monday, September 5, 2011

Twitter - Know your Limits


Twitter enforces various limitations on the things you can do within the social network. This includes the amount of characters you’re allowed in a tweet, the length of your userrname, and how many people you’re able to follow before somebody on the other end goes, “Whoa.”

It isn’t obvious to most Twitter users that there are seven types of Twitter limits that affect regular Twitter users that I have identified so far.



TWITTER LIMITS:
  1. 2,000 Twitter Followers Limit: You can’t follow more than 2,000 until almost 2,000 follow you. This is the toughest limit to deal with so if you notice someone is at 2,000 don’t unfollow them for not following you back (because they can’t) and consider tweeting a #followfriday recommendation for them so they can get past that limit. When you hit this limit you will see the message: ” You are unable to follow more people. Please read about our following limits. ”SOLUTION: You have to unfollow non-followers in order to follow anyone else. A Twitter App like JustUnfollow as I explained in this strategy for Growing Twitter Followers.
  2. Twitter Followers to Following Percentage Limit: You can only follow a small percentage more people than follow you. According to Twitter: “this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following. When you hit this limit, we’ll tell you by showing an error message in your browser. You’ll need to wait until you have more followers in order to follow more users—basically, you can’t follow 10,000 people if only 100 people follow you.” SOLUTION: Same as for limit #1 just above.
  3. Following (daily): 1000 – Joe from Internet Marketing for Local Businessbelieves (and I agree) that there are what he called “velocity limits”…in other words just as the tweets per day are split up by hour so is following. While you can follow 1000 per day you can’t follow them too quickly or you’ll hit a limit that may lock down your account for up to 24 hours. I believe it is safer to follow during off hours instead of during prime U.S. business hours if you don’t want to hit that limit. You wouldn’t want to be unable to tweet something important because you did.
  4. Tweets Per Day: 1000
  5. Tweets Per Hour (or semi-hourly interval?): I have not found a specific number; however, one could theorize this would be approximately 1000 divided by 24 hours = about 41 tweets per hour. See How Many Tweets Can You Post Per Day for more details.
  6. Direct Messages: 250 per day
  7. Changes to Account Email: 4 per hour
Brian D. Hawkins from HotBlogTips home of some of the very best blogging tipsshared this important bit of advice:

Even though we stay well below the radar when it comes
to Twitter limits, 
there’s always the risk of being
squashed if we’re not careful.

He commented that Website Magazine just had a very informative article on how to keep from being banned by Twitter as they go through this huge review process. A lot of decent people are loosing their accounts everyday by doing what most of us might consider business as usual. Read their Ban This! New Rules for Twitter Usersfor more details.
If you ever hear of anyone having their account banned get the word out. Maybe if we rally to the defense of someone who has a quality Twitter account they will reconsider and unban them.

Official Twitter Pages About Twitter Limits:


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