Twitter Limits Explained

I mentioned in my previous post on Free Twitter Tools To grow Your Followers that Twitter has some limits on the number of people you can follow and this post sets out to detail some of these limits.

It can be difficult to get this information and many people, especially those new to twitter are not aware of the constraints Twitter has put in place, so I will detail them here so you can get the most out of the service. Many of these limits have been put in place to help prevent spam accounts and to limit gaming the service.

Twitter itself provides the following information on limits:

• 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices (web, mobile web, phone, API, etc. )
• 250 total direct messages per day, on any and all devices
• 150 API requests per hour

They also have this to say:

“We’ve also placed limits on the number of people you can follow. The number is different for everyone, and is based on a ratio that changes as the account changes. If you hit a follow limit, you must balance your follower/following ratio in order to follow more people- basically, you can’t follow 50,000 people if only 23 people follow you. Based on current behavior in the Twitter community, we’ve concluded that this is both fair and reasonable.“

Maximum Following Limit

Twitter has a maximum following limit of 2,000 people or 110% of your total followers. Many people hit this limit and don’t know why they can’t add any new people to follow. This limit means that you can only follow 2,000 people until you have nearly that many people following you back; that is where the 110% figure comes in. Basically, if you are following 2,000 people, you will not be able to follow any more until you have at least 1,820 following you. If you have come up against this limit and do not know how to get past it, you don’t have to wait until you get to 1,820 followers to continue, just follow the tips in this post and you’ll be back on your way to adding more followers.

Once you get past the 2,000 limit, the 110% restriction is still in place so, even if have 3,000 followers, you are restricted to being able to follow 3,300 people.

Daily Follow Limit

Twitter had previously set the daily follow limit at 1,000 people, but seem to have revised this down to 500 and for some people as low as 200. The exact figure is difficult to gauge, as it primarily seems based on the 110% calculation.

If you provide poor quality tweets, i.e. you appear to be spamming a lot and you add more than 1,000 people per day, your account could be flagged, suspended, or at worst, banned.

Maximum Follower Limit

The good thing is that there isn’t any limit on the number of people who can follow you, so even if you have hit a follower limit in a day and you get some new followers, you seem to be able to follow them back, once you have gone past the 2,000 limit.

Hopefully this will help clarify some of Twitters limits for you. If you are suffering from any of these limits, read my post here on how to get past Twitter’s follow limits so you can follow more people.

Free Twitter Tools To Grow Your Followers

UPDATE: Since this post was written, Twitter has made changes to its service and terms of use. Due to this, many of the techniques and tools described in this post no longer work. To see what works now, read my updated post on the Best Way To Increase Your Twitter Followers.

I see a lot of links posted on Twitter for software and services to help you grow your Twitter followers list, so I thought I’d give you the rundown on some free alternatives as well as some of the paid offerings.

Whether you are new to Twitter or not, many of you are probably wondering how people get so many followers to their Twitter accounts so quickly; surely they can’t be that popular? The truth is, outside of having a celebrity profile, or being a Webstar, the majority are using tools and techniques that help them grow their follower list faster and larger then would happen organically.

There are many reasons to develop a large followers list, the majority of them being gaining more exposure, allowing you to attract more people to your site, or simply earn more money through advertising. Some people may think that this makes your group of followers less authentic and to some degree it is, but it has also allowed me to meet some people and get information, products, etc that I otherwise would not have heard about. I should also say that I have only been using these techniques for about one week on this account and in that time I have more than doubled the number of followers.

Whatever the reason, if you want to grow your follower list, there are several free options available to you that will allow you to grow your list fairly quickly and relatively easily.

The one caveat to all this is that you should not become a spammer. People wont listen to what you have to say and there is also a good chance that your account could be flagged, which will kind of defeat the purpose of growing your follower numbers.

How To Get More Followers

Put simply, the basics of getting more followers is to add more people. The problem with this is that, Twitter has limits on the number of people you can follow each day and adding a couple of hundred people manually takes time, a lot of time, even more if you are looking to add people with particular interests. This is where the automatic tools come in handy.

There are tools you can buy that cover almost every feature you could want, but these range in price from $55 – $197. Luckily, there are free tools available that will give you most of the features you require.

Using Firefox

The first tool is a simple Firefox Greasemonkey script. If you don’t know what Firefox is, it is a free Web Browser that offers many more features then Internet Explorer. You can download your free copy of Firefox here. Once you have FireFox installed, download and install the Greasemnkey plugin. Once you have added this, just download the free Twitter Friend Adder.

With all this setup, you are ready to start adding friends automatically. To do this, find a big name you want to follow, to begin with preferably in the same niche you are in. For example, if you are in the tech niche, then you might go to Chris Pirillo’s profile and click on his followers (see image below). In the top left you will see a button saying “Add All Followers”. Clicking this will automatically start adding one of his followers every 2 seconds until your follower limit is reached. In theory, you are permitted to follow 1,000 people each day, but there are some constraints to this number, which you can read about in my post on Twitter Limits Explained.

Finding Followers

If you are stuck for profiles to add, just got to wefollow, where you can find a list of the top Twitter users across a range of niches.

Another tool I use to add users is a service called twittgeek, which allows you to add users based around specific keyword. You provide a list of keywords that you’re interested in and twittgeek scans profiles to find who uses those keywords in their statues and automatically follows the.

Deleting People Is Important

Remember before where I said in theory you can follow 1,000 people each day, well that would be true if each of them followed you back. Unfortunately, in reality, that rarely happens, so it is important that you delete people that don’t follow you back, otherwise you will quickly be hammering at your Twitter account limit.

The other reason you will want to delete people is because, is that your following to follower ratio is important for several reasons. If you have lot less people following you then you are following, you will not make you look very popular. Like many aspects of life, people want to associate with popular people, so it is important to keep this ratio in check.

You should automatically unfollow everyone who doesn’t follow you back, so you keep your following to follower ratio in balance. You should only do this every couple of days, as you want to give people the chance to follow you back before you delete them.

One script that allows you to automatically unfollow people is Twitter Karma. Using it, you the option to unfollow everyone not following you in one action. Once your list begins to get large it does take a while to load though. Another tip you may want to use is to unfollow those who do not tweet very often. Untweeps is the tool to use for this. The reason for unfollowing those who haven’t tweeted for a while is that the lack of tweeting means that they aren’t really active on the service and so do not really lose anyting by unfollowing them. The other advantage to this, is that if they aren’t active on the service, then there is a good chance that they wont know you have stopped following them. Untweeps allow you to set the number of days since a profile has been updated, but personally, I would choose something around the 14 – 30 day mark.

Pro Twitter Tools

As I mentioned earlier, there are paid tools that provide the functionality I have detailed in this article and much more. If you are serious about using Twitter for marketing or some other purpose, using a professional tool will greatly simplify your tasks. I will gove a full review in a later post, but in the meantime, you can check out what I feel is the best of the current tools, tweetadder.

This really is the complete tool for taking your Twitter marketing to the next level, go and check it out now.

Make Money with Sponsored Tweets on Twitter

I recently signed up with Sponsored Tweets, a new Twitter advertising platform from Izea that provides a market for advertisers and Tweeters to connect.

The program has been out for a little over a month now and today has rolled out some new and much needed features, that should make it even easier for advertisers and Tweeters to connect.

The concept of Sponsored Tweets is simply to provide a marketplace for advertisers to leverage the millions of Tweeters out there and at the same time allow Tweeters to make money from their tweets. As you can see, the concept is simple and so is the process.

Sponsored Tweets is not the first service to dip its toes into the paying Tweeter pool, but it is the best funded and backed by a proven company, which helps to guarantee a great deal more success. Add in a bunch of celebrities and big name Web stars and you have a product that has a lot more legitimacy.

How Sponsored Tweets Works

Setting up an account with Sponsored Tweets is very simple, you just create your account, and login automatically on the SponsoredTweets site with your Twitter account. You can see how simple the account setup is in the image of the setup screen below.

You can choose to be notified of advertiser offers by Direct Message or email. Once an offer comes in, you login to your Sponsored Tweets account and approve or deny the tweet. The advertiser has the choice of writing what they want you to tweet, but the majority I have had, leave it up to you to tweet. When you write the tweet, it is sent to the advertiser for approval. Once approved and tweeted, the money is deposited into your account.

You can choose to charge per click, or charge per tweet. How much you charge is entirely up to you, but Sponsored Tweets will give you a suggested price, but you are not goverened to use this amount. Several factors are involved in estimating hos much you can charge for a tweet, but generally, the more followers you have, the more you can charge.

Is This Sanctioned By Twitter?

To dispel any concerns about this being allowed by Twitter, the answer is YES. Twitter has no problem with Sponsored Tweets or Tweeters using the service.

The question of ethics is also covered, with each tweet having full disclosure about it being an advertised, or sponsored tweet.

Can You Make Money With Sponsored Tweets?

Now the question you are all probably interested in, is whether you can actually make money with Sponsored Tweets. The answer is a definite YES. I have already made money from the service and many others are doing the same as well. The good thing is that it really doesn’t take long to earn the money, you spend a couple of minutes writing the tweet and the rest is automatic. Easy money.

I am still doing some testing with the service, regarding price settings and I will pass on my findings once I have more data. Until then, why not go and sign up yourself  with Sponsored Tweets and make some extra money while you tweet.