Do You Know the Twitter Limits?

Update (6.1/2013) — Added biography character limit & Image sizes
Update (6/1/2012) — Added lists and unfollow limits

You may be new to Twitter, or you may have been using it for a long time and hit the famous “2000” limit.  Most social networks have limits in place for the number of people you can “friend” or “follow”. For example, Google+ currently has a limit of 5,000 people you can have in your circles, and you have a limit of 5,000 “friends” on Facebook. This is to stop people, businesses or automated programmes from abusing the system.

On Twitter it used to be possible to bulk follow thousands and thousands of people in the hope that they would follow you back. This caused many Twitter accounts to abuse this and follow tens of thousands of people whilst not creating engaging content and not having many people follow them back. Not good. Twitter began back in March 2006 (in a geeky way I’m quite proud that I joined in November 2006), but it wasn’t until July/August 2008 that Twitter started imposing limits on the number of people you could follow. Twitter was having massive problems with spam (as Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone blogged  at the time). There was a lot of backlash at the time, and a lot of confusion (see this ZDNet post on Twitter Spam efforts goes overboardand this blog post by Brad Williams on Twitter Follow Limits Are Jacked). It’s commonly assumed that Twitter introduced a 2,000 following limit, meaning that you could only follow up to 2,000 people. However, this isn’t strictly true.

Following Limit

According to the author, Rob Brown, the magic number is actually 1,819! This means if you have 1,819 followers you can break through the 2,000 limit. Below 1,819 you are capped at following 2,000 people. Above 1,819 you can follow this number +10% (or 182). At 1,819+10% this means you can follow 2,001 people and you have just broken the 2,000 limit– hurray! This (as Rob Brown mentions on this post) means for every 10 people that follow you, you can follow 11.

Personally, I think this is a good thing. I’m a bit concerned when I see someone with a large number of people they follow– especially if they don’t have engaging content. Twitter is about engagement and networking– it is a social network after all. Having said that, following a large number of people isn’t always a bad thing. I love to follow new people, particularly those who Tweet about social media. I manage a large number of followers using Twitter lists– putting the people I find particularly interesting into my “awesome” list. Less regularly, I’ll check my main Twitter stream, and perhaps add some cool people to this list.

There is also a limit on how quickly you can follow people. Twitter have imposed a technical limit of following 1000 per day. Thank goodness for that! However as this is a technical limit, following that amount per day is likely to get you banned due to breaking Twitters Following Rules and best practices (you should read this if you haven’t already).

Unfollow Limits

So, how many people can you unfollow? This is more of a tricky question since Twitter doesn’t actually say. Twitter tools such as Social Oomph and Manage Flitter have been asked by Twitter in the past to remove or alter their unfollow tools, because this could go against Twitter terms. You can read about Social Oomph’s take on this here. The issue is what Twitter calls “aggressive follower churn” i.e. following and unfollowing people in quick succession with the aim of rapidly increasing your followers.  You can read more on Twitter’s Rules page. It is still possible to bulk unfollow using Manage Flitter, but you have to click on each person manually, and then click unfollow. Yes, there are various javascript hacks using Google Chrome, but to be honest you’ll want to stay away from this is it is likely to get you banned. So, is there a number on how many people you can unfollow at one time? Just use your common sense. I’ve unfollowed over 500 people in one day, but that was a one off– I wanted to unclutter my feed, but if I unfollowed 500 people each day I’d likely get banned.

Other Limits

There are other limits, as the Twitter support pages states. You can post up to 1,000 tweets per day (this is spread throughout the day– there are limits per hour, so you can’t just post 1,000 all at once!) You can post up to 250 direct messages per day (thank goodness!) You can change your email up to 4 times per hour (why would you want to do that anyway?) You can have up to 20 lists (the total of the ones you follow and ones you have created yourself) There are also limits when you use the Twitter API, but that’s another topic.

Twitter recently added the option of adding a header image. These have a maximum resolution of 1252 x 626 pixels (with a max upload size of 5Mb. You don’t have to upload your image at 1252x626, but it’s best to make it close to that to give a crisp and clear image. Certainly try make it above 640 pixels in width otherwise it will look pixelated. Finally, despite each tweet allowing a maximum of 140 characters, your biography can have up to 160 characters. How very generous of Twitter!

Summary

So, there you go. Remember, Twitter is a social network– these limits are for your and my protection. Do you think these limits are appropriate, or do you think they should be modified? Let me know in the comments below.