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Twitter Limits: Do You Know About These Thresholds on X?

Arnel Bagyaratnam

Oct 24, 2024 11 mins read
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Knowing what Twitter limits are can ensure you have a great experience on the social media platform. You won’t have to deal with unnecessary errors or wait for hours to use specific features. Also, it prevents X, aka Twitter, from locking you out of your account.

Knowing these limits is essential whether you’re a new or long-time X user. What are they so that you know what to look out for while using the social media platform? Today’s discussion is about these Twitter limitations for various actions and activities.

Is There a Twitter Character Limit on the Social Media Platform?

As per the current Twitter character limit, a single post can’t contain more than 25,000 characters. However, this wasn’t the case on the social media platform for the longest time.
Did you know it was possible to use the micro-blogging website via text messages? This is because the social media network started as an SMS service. The initial 140-character cap was to ensure your tweets, now posts, fit within SMS’s limitations of 160 characters.

The remaining 20 characters were for your username and commands you want to include in the text. In 2020, the social media network stopped the SMS service in most regions. This move was because most users use Twitter via the website or the app. Also, there were security concerns regarding the use of SMSs.

In 2017, the platform bumped the character limit to 280 to make it easier to express yourself. At the same time, it ensures you still have to get to the point using the least number of words.
After Elon Musk became the owner, he reintroduced Twitter Blue, now X Premium. One feature you get as a subscriber is a substantial increase in the character limit. The initial bump was to 4,000 characters before pushing the cap to 10,000.

The new leadership boosted this threshold to the current limit, i.e., 25,000 characters.
X counts every alphabet, space, number, symbol, accent, and punctuation mark as a single character. On the other hand, emojis occupy two characters each, just like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters.

A screenshot from TweetDelete about an X engineer informing people about the increase in character limit.

Twitter DM Limit: How Many Messages a Day Is Too Much on X?

With a Twitter direct message (DM), you can contact anyone privately on the social media platform. It is an excellent feature for breaking the ice and starting a conversation. The current Twitter DM limit is 500 daily messages.

However, this doesn’t mean everyone can send up to 500 messages to X users every day. There are a few nuances regarding this limitation that you should keep in mind:

  • The platform won’t wait until you hit the 500 limit if you send the same message to multiple profiles. X may consider your DMs spam, restricting how often you can use the messaging feature. In this situation, the platform may ask you to stop using this feature for 30 minutes. After the temporary timeout, you can send DMs again.
  • X introduced a new DM setting where only people you follow can start conversing with you. If the user isn’t part of your following list, they need to send a request. Earlier, you can set it to Everyone so that anyone, even people you don’t follow, can message you. 

However, the platform changed this setting, introduced a new filter, and made it the default option. Now, only people with an X Premium subscription can send a request if you don’t follow them. Although you can still choose Everyone, you need to do it manually. This means you cannot send users messages if they don’t change the new default setting.

What are the Twitter Video Size Limits You Should Follow While Uploading?

According to Twitter, people are six times more likely to share posts with videos over images. If you’re looking to increase engagement, including videos in your tweets is an excellent strategy. However, you can’t just upload anything and call it a day. Why? There are Twitter video size limits you should know about, as highlighted below:

  • The minimum video resolution is 32 x 32 pixels, while the maximum is 1920 x 1200 or 1200 x 1900.
  • Your videos’ maximum frame rate and bitrate are 40 fps and 25 Mbps respectively. 
  • You must ensure the videos are within the aspect ratio of 1:2.39 – 2.39:1.
  • If you don’t have an X Premium subscription, your video’s length cannot be longer than 140 seconds. Also, your media’s file size must be within 512 MB.
  • X allows you to include timestamps in the post for the attached video. As per the latest limits, you can’t have over 50 timestamps in a tweet.

X Premium Subscribers

With X Premium, you can upload longer videos with larger file sizes, as highlighted below:

  • If the video resolution is 720p, the maximum length is 3 hours. Also, the file size shouldn’t be more than 8GB.
  • 1080p resolution videos can’t exceed 2 hours, and the file size shouldn’t go above 8GB. However, you can only upload 2-hour 1080p videos on X from the web or an iOS device. If you upload from an Android device, you must ensure the media doesn’t exceed the 10-minute mark.

What Should You Know About the Current Twitter Follow Limit?

Following other users on X is essential to your experience on this social media platform. It influences what kind of posts you’ll see in the For You and Following feeds. Given its importance, X limits how many people you can follow. These restrictions aim to ensure people don’t misuse this feature. Here are two tips about Twitter follow limits you must know about:

  1. Every day, you can’t follow more than 400 people on X. 
  2. The platform doesn’t enforce the follow ratio limit until you follow 5,000 users. After you reach this mark, you need to pay attention to the follow ratio limit. It is the ratio of how many users follow you to the number of people you follow on X. In other words, you must have a healthy balance of this metric to follow more people. Also, this ratio can differ depending on the user.

The platform may also stop you from following more people if you engage in these behaviors:

  • You follow a large number of accounts quickly. In this case, the platform limits this function for an hour.
  • You find a large number of accounts and follow them. After these users follow you back, you unfollow them. X defines this activity as follow churn and will restrict you from following more people or suspend your account.
  • You use automation to follow the same people as another user. The platform may also flag your profile if you do this without automation.
  • You promote or use a third-party service that provides followers for free or for a fee.
  • You follow several users on X without any rhyme or reason via automation. Again, your profile can get the platform’s attention if you do this without automation.

Twitter Age Limit: How Old Do You Have To Be To Use X?

Like every other social media platform, there is a Twitter age limit. When creating an account on X, you must be at least 13 years old. Some people don’t mention their age while creating their account.

Sometimes, users will update their date of birth after reaching 18. When the platform notices this activity, it immediately limits the account.

The platform takes this measure to ensure it doesn’t face any legal issues with the local government. You can ask X to restore access to your profile. However, the social media network only does so by deleting specific data from your account. It removes the following from your profile:

  • Any direct message you sent to users
  • Information about you on the profile page, other than your username and birthday
  • Every published post
  • All posts you liked
  • Saved collections, lists, and moments

You may need a guardian if you’re under 18 and want to unlock your account. However, this depends on the laws where you live.

You should know that when X locks your account when you are underage, you have 30 days to restore access. If you contact Twitter and fill out a form during this period, you’ll get back your profile. Otherwise, the social media platform will delete your account. 

Twitter Reading Limits: An Overview of How Many Posts You Can Go Through Daily

As 2023 is the year of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, X experienced a significant load on its servers. These tools used the platform’s data to improve their services at the expense of the user’s experience. Also, there was a surge in the activity of bots and bad actors on the social media network.

The new ownership implemented Twitter reading limits to prevent these activities from further degrading the user experience.

The initial cap was to allow new and unverified accounts to read up to 300 tweets per day. Unverified users were able to scroll past 600 posts every day. The limit was 6,000 posts for X Premium subscribers.

Twitter revised these temporary limits to 500 posts for new and unverified users. Accounts without the verification badge can go through 1,000 posts daily. For X Premium subscribers, the reading threshold increased to 10,000 tweets.

What Should You Do After You See the Twitter Rate Limit Exceeded Alert?

If you cross any thresholds highlighted in this article, you’ll see the Twitter rate limit exceeded message. What should you do when you come across this message? Is it a good idea to continue using X, or should you call it a day for now? The guide below explains what should be your next plan of action:

  1. Although these are daily limits, there are caps on what you do every hour. Sometimes, you will see the rate limit alert when you cross the hourly threshold. In this situation, close the desktop browser or mobile app and wait an hour. Open X after this duration and check if you’re still facing this issue. If you are still seeing the alert, try the next solution.
  2. Find out what’s trending on Twitter. When many people face the same problem, it will appear on the Explore page. This indicates you’re not the only one, and it is a problem with X. You’ll need to stop using Twitter until the social media giant fixes the issue.
  3. Check X’s support account to see if there are any updates. Sometimes, when the platform is facing high traffic, it will reduce the limits. The social media network’s support page may have a tweet regarding this when it happens.
  4. If all the previous tips don’t work, it is likely you exceeded the daily rate limit. In this situation, you must wait 24 hours, after which X removes the alert.

TweetDelete Helps You Avoid Suspension Twitter Limits

Next time you come across an X-limits alert, you know why you’re facing this issue. Also, you have the necessary knowledge to resolve these problems quickly. Contact the platform’s customer support if you cannot fix the rate limit issue despite trying everything.

X also limits how many posts you can publish daily, i.e., 2,400 tweets. There is also a cap on how many posts and reposts you can make every 30 minutes. If you do the math, this is roughly 50 posts every half hour.

When a bad actor gains control of your account, they can easily publish these many tweets every 30 minutes. The platform will lock your account and prevent your profile from engaging in this activity.

After you regain access, you must remove these posts so that X restores your account’s functionality. However, this isn’t an easy task as you have to do this manually.

With TweetDelete, you can use the auto-delete feature to remove posts that contain specific words. This will help target spam-like posts and delete them. There’s also a bulk-delete tweet feature for granular control over what you want to remove. This way, you won’t have to worry about Twitter limits affecting your profile.

You can also use this tool to delete older tweets that will affect you personally. For instance, when you apply for a new job, the employer will check your profile on X. If there is anything they disagree with, it hampers your chance of landing the position.

Join TweetDelete today so you never have to worry about these issues again!

Arnel Bagyaratnam

Arnel Bagyaratnam is an SEO writer for TweetDelete who is avidly interested in covering tech. Previously, he was a digital strategist for Holystoked, helping the company switch from an offline model to a hybrid store with a strong online presence. He also worked as a copywriter and SEO consultant for VERB Studio. An industrial engineering & management graduate, he spends his free time breaking and digging for music to dance to.

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