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.