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.