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To curb spamming and ensure that their platform remains conducive to normal human interactions, Twitter has put measures in place to limit the number of activities you can perform on the platform within a specific timeframe.
These include follow limits, unfollow limits, as well as DM, and liking limits.
It is essential to always stay within these limits when you’re running your business on Twitter to avoid getting your Twitter account in trouble.
Twitter Daily follow limits
Unlike other social media platforms that do not disclose their follow limits, Twitter has openly stated that every Twitter account can follow up to 400 accounts per day.
Verified Twitter accounts can follow up to 1000 accounts per day.
How many can you follow on Twitter per hour?
Assuming you’re following manually on Twitter, it’s reasonable to allocate 8 hours per day to perform this activity. Going by the official Twitter follow limits, this translates to 50 follows per hour.
Our experience however shows that you may start experiencing issues when you do it all at once.
A better idea would be to follow 10 -15 people continuously, wait about 7 – 10 minutes, follow another 10 – 15, and on and on until you reach 50 within the hour.
What happens when you follow too quickly on Twitter?
When you try to reach these official limits, Twitter algorithms sort of start to scrutinize what your account is up to.
This is when you’ll start getting prompted to verify your phone number, confirm you’re human, or even both. Your account may also be locked or limited.
You may sometimes start to see certain restriction errors. We’ll mention them below.
You are unable to follow more people at this time
This is one of those errors that you’ll see when you’ve reached your account’s daily follow limit or when you follow many people too quickly.
When this happens, you should wait for 24hrs before attempting to follow once more.
Twitter 3-day restriction
The 3 days Twitter follow restriction manifests itself differently for different people.
For some, when this message pops up, they are unable to follow, like, and Retweet, just as the message says, while others are able to continue performing these actions.
I’d recommend sitting out the whole 3 days before attempting to follow again.
When the 3 days are over, you should consider starting to follow slowly and increase your target limits gradually over the next few days.
Does Twitter’s official follow limits actually work?
My own experience has taught me to take every official claim made by any social media company with a grain of salt.
These official limits may have worked to a great extent in 2016 but that may no longer be true for 2021.
I run all my Twitter accounts on an automation tool. I personally created some of these accounts while I bought the rest from them.
There are a few patterns that you pick up on when running multiple accounts of different ages and other factors. Some of my observations are as follows:
- Aged Twitter accounts experience fewer hurdles than accounts that are newly created.
- Twitter accounts created on residential or mobile (4G) IP addresses will last longer without getting flagged than those created on cheap proxies.
- Twitter accounts that have not been active for a while also tend to face more restrictions than those that are regularly active on Twitter.
- ‘Warming up’ your Twitter accounts is a good way of avoiding follow blocks.
As of writing this article, I never follow more than 200 accounts per day. 150 – 180 follows per day is my current sweet spot.
I don’t experience any follow blocks, no prompts to confirm I’m human, and none of my accounts get suspended.
I’m pretty sure you could follow a lot more than these numbers, but I’d rather do fewer and instead run more accounts on my automation tool of choice.
I’ve shared my income-generating Twitter journey in this article. You can also read about other Jarvee settings for Twitter here.
With this social media automation tool, you can also automatically send DMs on Twitter, perform other activities 24/7, and generate passive income from Twitter.
How to bypass Twitter follow limits in 2021
You can bypass follow restrictions on Twitter by factoring in the points made in the previous topic.
First off, when you’re looking to buy Twitter accounts for your marketing campaigns, insist on getting only aged accounts. Accounts that are 2 – 3 years old are a great start.
Always create your Twitter accounts on residential or mobile IP addresses. In case you’re buying accounts, look for sellers who created them on these types of networks.
You should always warm up your accounts. Warming up your accounts means starting very slow and gradually increasing how many activities you perform on your accounts.
My warm-up period will usually last for the first week. The strategy usually goes like this:
- Day1: follow 20 – 30 accounts, like 20 – 30
- Day2: follow 35 – 50 accounts, like 35 – 50
- Day3: follow 65 – 80 accounts, like 65 – 80
- Day4: follow 95 – 110 accounts, like 95 – 110
- Day5: follow 125 – 140 accounts, like 125 – 140
- Day6: follow 155 – 170 accounts, like 155 – 170
- Day7: follow 185 – 200 accounts, like up to 200
Does the follow/unfollow method of growing a following on Twitter work anymore?
Five years ago the follow/unfollow method of growing on Twitter worked tremendously well. Today, not so well anymore.
However, it’s still a great method of bringing attention to your account and will work particularly well when you’re promoting certain products than when you’re trying to get people to follow you.
You could however increase your chances of getting a follow back by doing the following:
- Ensure that you only follow people in the same niche as yourself
- Like 2 – 3 tweets after following someone
- Only follow accounts that have been active in the last few days
- Ignore accounts that don’t have profile pictures and/or have their bio written in foreign characters.
Thankfully, the automation tool I use for my Twitter marketing campaigns has all these features and I only need to check what I need and uncheck what I don’t.
Related: Instagram follow limit
