Twitter Sees a Big Traffic Boost and Makes Some Changes

Good things are happening for Twitter now that its deal with Google is back in place to index tweets as they happen. According to a study at Similarweb.com, Twitter's desktop traffic has increased 20% (or 35 million monthly visits) over the last six months. They've also seen a 6.5% decrease in their bounce rate meaning that searchers are more often finding what they want on the site and hanging out for a bit.

Searches for branded keywords and people are the most likely to result in a Twitter feed showing up in the search results just below a company's website listing. If your business already has a strong Twitter presence this is a great opportunity for additional exposure.

Twitter has also been updating some of their policies and rules including increasing the follow limit from 2,000 to 5,000 for all users.

Starting today, we are increasing our current follow limit from 2,000 to 5,000 accounts for all users: https://t.co/Yxx66XESMf

— Twitter Support (@Support) October 27, 2015

This means that all users can follow up to 5,000 people without needing to increase the number of followers they have. After reaching the new 5,000 following limit, you'll see an error message in your browser with more users becoming available by improving your follower to following ratio. Twitter has also added aggressive follow churn (following and unfollowing accounts repeatedly) and aggressive following (indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts) to their list of behaviors to avoid. You can read their updated rules here.