Brad Wellman
Spyder Trap Online Marketing



This blog post is meant to serve as an informative blurb about the limits Twitter has placed on user activity. Twitter places limits on the types of actions a user can perform on any given day as a way to monitor for suspicious activity. Twitter notifies users when they are approaching a certain limit, or once the limit has been reached, and some of these limits include:

• - 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices
• - 250 total direct messages per day, on any and devices
• - 100 API requests per hour
• - Maximum number of follow attempts in a day

The first limit in this list seemed rather strange to me because, if my math is right, 1,000 updates per day would mean that in a 24 hour period, the user is updating over 41 times per hour! This seems like a rather loose limit because, honestly, who needs to update their Twitter status every 60 seconds? What could someone possibly have to say that is so unique and interesting every minute of the day?

Twitter also implemented limits on the number of followers a user can have, and it largely has to deal with the discrepancy between the number of followers a user has, and the number of people they are following. According to Twitter:

“Follow limits are based on several things, one of which is our belief in a person’s good standing and intention. The behind-the-scenes portion of follow limiting varies by account, relationship, and changes over time. Based on current behavior in the Twitter community, we’ve concluded that this is both fair and reasonable. While we figure out what works best for everyone, the limits may change occasionally, but this is the nucleus and future limits will be based upon the success of these.”

To learn more about Twitter limits, ethics and best practices, check out their support page here or if you’d like to discuss, Tweet me @Brad_Wellman on Twitter.