If you’ve been following along yourself with the quest for 1,000 followers – you’ve been playing “inside the lines” as far as twitter’s rules and limitations. So this raises the question, where does Twitter draw the line to determine abuse in your account?

As Twitter continues to grow in popularity and effectiveness, they have imposed a set of restrictions. Unfortunately for us they don’t tell us what these restrictions are, nor do they inform you before blocking or throttling your account. So it’s your responsibility to seek out Twitter’s rules and then play by them to ensure long term success.

API Calls per hour – twitter limits the number of Application Programming Interface (API) calls to 150 per hour. What that means is you can only follow and tweet a total of 150 times in an hour or Twitter will shut you down for the rest of that hour.

250 DM’s per day – Twitter limits the number of Direct Messages (DMs) that you can send in one day. This is the main reason we don’t follow more than 100 or 200 people in a day since we have an auto DM in place from socialoompf.com as we want to make the connection with people once they follow us. I’m not sure if twitter shuts you down for the rest of the day or shuts your account down completely but I don’t want to find out either way.

The 2,000 user threshold – The number of people you can initially follow on twitter is 2,000 there isn’t any restriction on the number of people who follow you, only on who you can follow. The good news to people who are gaining followers as quickly as they are following is that once you get over 2,000 twitter allows you to follow 10% more people than are following you. So as long as you are following 2,200 when 2,000 are following you, you’re still in business. Both buzzom.com and twitterfollower.com have functions that allow you to flush your twitter account of followers who are not following you, and to reciprocate those who begin following you.

Some other things to keep in mind: Twitter is constantly changing their criteria for spamming and methods of spam detection so they are suspicious of users who continually post duplicate or near-duplicate tweets, post similar messages in several accounts or abuse trending topics or hashtags (topics with a # sign).

As a rule of thumb, twitter is for sharing not broadcasting, informing not spamming – if you keep that in mind, you will enjoy great success without being limited or cut off.

With one whole day left in the challenge, I’ve only got 40 followers to go until I reach my goal so I’m hopeful that I will reach 1,000 followers at noon on December 31st, just in time for the new year!

Day 9 Recap

Following: 1075
Followers: 960

Time spent – ½ Hour (1 out of 10 remaining)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 and is filed under News, Twitter: 1000 Followers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.