We had a great “meet & tweet” Q&A with Todder Moning of U.S. Bank yesterday. (Thank you, Todder!)

Great that is, except for our experience with Twitter itself, and that experience offers a cautionary tale to all.

Banks across the nation have embraced Twitter as a customer service channel. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, SunTrust Banks, even smaller banks like First Niagara avidly use Twitter to connect with their customers. 

But there are risks, as we discovered yesterday. Our meet & tweet was going along swimmingly. Questions were pouring in from not just the U.S., but as far away as Ireland, and Todder was offering valuable responses. This was truly a discussion on the future of banking, as you can see from the resulting “chirpstory.”

But suddenly, we could not access any page on Twitter. @BankInnovation shut down, as did @ToddermUSB, our guest tweeter’s feed, and every other Twitter feed we tried. We had bumped up against what Twitter calls “Twitter Limits.” These limits cap the usage of feeds up to a certain level, and are intended to prevent Twitter — all of Twitter — from crashing.

Here are the official limits:

• Direct Messages: 250 per day.
• Updates: 1,000 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.
• Changes to Account Email: 4 per hour.
• Following (daily): Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior. You can find detailed page describing following limits and prohibited behavior on the Follow Limits and Best Practices Page. The technical follow limit is 1,000 per day.
• Following (account-based): Once an account is following 2,000 other users, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios.

What you will notice is that there is no official hourly limit for updates, yet yesterday we had bumped up against one. The error message we received specifically indicated that we had violated an “hourly” limit on updates. We have tried to isolate exactly what those limits are, but were unsuccessful.

I should mention that we dealt with the problem yesterday by briefly switching to another Twitter feed we maintain. Approximately 10 minutes later, @BankInnovation was back up.

These Twitter Limits are important, because it might be the case that Twitter can’t be used as each user wishes. The @BankInnovation Twitter feed has about 4,200 followers, and our “meet & tweet,” which generated a waterfall of activity in a relatively brief timeframe, violated this Twitter Limit. What of @Ask_WellsFargo, which has more than 10,000 followers, and @BofA_Help, which boasts more than 20,000 followers? There just might be a problem lurking behind your next tweet.