Twitter: you can be banned
An acquaintance of mine signed in (or attempted) to his Twitter account, only to find out it didn’t exist anymore. When he wrote to Twitter regarding this, their reply from support noted several reasons this could happen:
1. you’ve followed a large number of people in a short amount of time
2. there is a small number of followers compared to number of people you’re following
3. the updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
4. a large number of users blocking the profile and writing in with spam complaints
Now, I don’t know the details, so I don’t know why this particular case happened, but it seems the first three could apply to over half of the people I follow.
What do you do when you first join Twitter? You add all your friends then go around following people that look interesting or fun. So most of us are guilty of #1 already in our first days of being a Twitter user.
Again with #2, if you are new or not particularly well known, for quite a while the people you follow is going to be a far higher number than those that follow you.
I can fully understand the #3 and #4. Most people want to see human conversation at least a good percentage of the time rather than 100% spam or links, but they do not seem to be clamping down on the links so much.
For me #4 must be the overriding factor. If you do all the above but get zero complaints, I suggest you should be fine. After all, if you don’t like someone, stop following them, right?
It seems that the safest way to make sure no ‘red flags’ are raised is to grow your Twitter account organically and make sure you mix chatty updates in with your links.
You don’t want to put lots of effort into your Twitter account only to find it doesn’t work any more!
Tip offered by Susan Gilbert, AME’s Search Engine Marketing Expert and Web 2.0 company owner, http://www.JoomlaJump.com , which provides Social Networking websites and services.
September 20th, 2008 at 8:07 am
OK #2 seems crazy to me! I would guess they dont just autoban you for that but if they are looking at your for other reasons they use that as an excuse.
September 28th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Bots!! Of late Twitter has been cracking down on the incredible amount of spam going through and deleting users who display these characteristics.
“You add all your friends then go around following people that look interesting or fun”. How many friends do we have? If they’re our friends they will follow us back, this is the raison d’etre for Twitter, not for submitting links ad nauseum. Speaking personally, I’ve blocked users who followed me and posted nothing but links for 2 weeks.
This is what Twitter states : “What we do is flag certain users who are adding very large numbers of friends (i.e., if you’re adding an average number of friends, you’re OK and won’t get flagged). Essentially, there are extremely spammy users and bots that try to friend every account they possibly can – sometimes it’s possible for a real person to trip these flags, but unlikely (you have to be following a pretty significant number of people over your number of followers).”
I don’t know what your acquaintance who ran afoul of the TOS did but an email to support should clear it up.