From an end user perspective, social media started off as a tool to keep in touch with family and friends. But, I guess that alone won’t make money for the social network, and commercial application was their goal all along.
Now that Twitter has become quite so popular; it has become an invaluable tool for businesses looking to connect with as many people as possible. Twitter has put up limits to prevent abuse of the platform, and these limits (I think) are quite hard to be reached by the typical end user.
However, brands looking to generate as many leads as possible in as little time as possible will likely come close to exceeding the limits set or even surpassing them. That is when things start to go south for brands as Twitter will probably classify them as spammers, and the repercussions could be severe.
The Twitter Limits You Should Know
You cannot Tweet more than 140 Characters
Just wait a minute! I know you got that ‘dah-look’ on your face right now after reading this first limit. It is not only obvious but also seems unworthy to mention. But consider this; what if you are using 3rd party tools or you are creating your tweets in Notepad, Word and then uploading them in bulk? It is critically important to remember you can only tweet out 140 characters. Otherwise, your tweets will be truncated or not go out at all. If they go out truncated, that decreases your chances of getting people to engage with your tweets.
Twitter Username is limited to just 15 Characters
If you have a long name or business name for that matter that you would like to squeeze in its entirety in your Twitter username. You only have 15 characters to work with. Also, remember, the username only contains letters A-Z, numbers, underscores and nothing else; no dashes or symbols!
You can’t follow more than 1,000 accounts in 24 hours
I bet you did not know that! If you did, you are among a very short list of tweeps that know this. Again, this is a trap I imagine only brands with newbie Twitter accounts can fall into. If you follow 1,000 Twitter accounts per day, you will come up on Twitter’s radii of spammers. Even if you are a legit spammer, try to doing things smartly and fly low to avoid detection by the spammer radii, keep it 100 accounts per day.
To follow over 2,000 accounts, you must have, at least 1,819 followers
If you played it safe and avoided being detected by not following more than 1,000 Twitter accounts per day. Twitter has another limit to keep spammers from following thousands upon thousands to accounts. You can only follow up to 2,000 accounts before hitting a wall. From there you can only follow 10% more accounts than your followers. Again, be smart about it, there is no need to follow thousands of people in a rush only to have to unfollow hundreds of people so you can follow new people. Grow your following gradually and maintain a rational follower to following ratio.
You cannot exceed 2,400 tweets per day
I still can’t see the end user making 2,400 tweets per day. Assuming you are on Twitter for the full 18 hours per day, that would be 133 tweets per hour and a little over two tweets per minute. That level of activeness on Twitter would be crazy, although not impossible. Someone must have already come up with a program that dishes out Tweets like an automatic gun shooting out bullets but never needs to reload. You will probably be a nuisance to your Twitter community, and people will just unfollow or block you all together. Just so you know, the 2,400 tweets per day limit does also count the retweets and reply tweets.
You can send a maximum of 1,000 Direct Messages per day
The good thing with DMs is that you can send them out in more than 140 characters. Twitter scrapped that restriction back in August 2015. However, you cannot exceed 1,000 DMs per day, so you might want to be careful with those auto responses.
1,000 Twitter Lists maximum with each list having 5,000 Accounts max
The Twitter list can be useful when you are looking to narrow your attention from all the clutter to a short list of accounts you find most compelling. You can also easily develop and maintain relationships with those short lists. However, you cannot create over 1,000 lists, and each list is limited to containing a maximum of 5,000 accounts.
You can’t change your email for a particular account more than four times in an hour
Sounds like a funny rule, doesn’t it? Why would anyone change his or her Twitter account’s email address that often; four times within a span of one hour! Maybe such funny things do happen.
If you are a normal user chances are you are never going to reach most of the above limits. Well, except for the 140 characters limit (even though that is to be scrapped with time), and the 15 characters limits for the username.
However, I can imagine several occasion when business brands might approach or hit most of the limits mentioned above. It a tough world out there, and you are just trying to get paid, So is everyone else.
