Making sure businesses can always respond to customers Direct Messages

As part of our efforts to make customer experiences better on Twitter, we’ve introduced features that allow people to more easily start a private conversation with businesses such as the Direct Message deep link and Direct Message Card. We’ve also made it easier for people to quickly engage with welcome messages and quick replies.

Today, we are excited to introduce adaptive rate limits, a new feature for developers sending Direct Messages through our API. Adaptive rate limits help to ensure that businesses can always respond to customers who privately message them, even when inbound volumes are high.

Accounts may send up to 5 messages via the API in reply to a message they have received within 24 hours. Each message received resets this threshold. This change is now available to all accounts that send Direct Messages via a third party tool using the POST direct_messages/event/new endpoint.

For example, Microsoft recently launched the chatbot Zo (@ZoChats), which uses artificial intelligence to connect with people to chat and play games. Previously, launching a chatbot meant to handle tens of thousands of conversations per day would have been challenging. Now with adaptive rate limits, Zo is able to have a real-time conversation with everyone who sends her a message.

For developers who enable Direct Message creation, we encourage you to migrate to the new POST direct_messages/event/new endpoint, and have a migration guide to assist you in the process. Not only will migrating automatically enable adaptive rate limits for your users, but the legacy POST direct_messages/new endpoint will be retired on June 19th, 2018 and will no longer be functional.

Adaptive rate limits is one part an initiative to make it easier for developers to help businesses and people to connect on Twitter. To see more about where we are investing, check out our API platform roadmap.