Twitter Rules, Taboos and Myths Exploded
Rules Twitter kindly makes all its rules very public.
However none of them are particularly specific and it then places a somewhat subjective view on its own rules.
I have lost 18 Twitter accounts in the past 2 weeks and after appeal had one reinstated.
The net effect of this action by Twitter was that I have lost not only 110000 Followers but that it has also slowed down my dreams of total Twitter domination.
I have conservatively grown each of these accounts - never inviting more than 500 new followers per day, per identity and only unfollowing every 3 days and then never by more than 300.
The primary reason for suspending these accounts was over aggressive following! They also said I should cease to use automatic follow and unfollow tools.
I use no such tools as they cost money.
I am however reconsidering this as the sales of Hummingbird and Tweetadder, to name but two, indicate that these tools are indeed been used by many people without penalty! I use Social Oomph solely as an autoresponder for the initial thank you tweet and I have it set on unfollowto flush those who do not follow after 3 days.
All my following is done manually using Buzzom, which I also use as the Flushing tool.
The second reason they gave for suspending the accounts was use of multiple accounts.
Twitter specifically allows multiple accounts.
I have never attempted to mask my identity in each of my accounts, unlike many others, but it would appear that honesty does not pay.
I will alias my accounts in future! It would appear that their software clearly picks up the duplicate identities but not the IP addresses.
The third reason they gave for suspending the accounts was too high a proportion of automated tweets as opposed to personal tweets.
I do give my followers a regular supply of news items automatically which are relevant to my followers interests and are of much higher quality than I can supply.
My followers appreciated this supply of information which I can gauge by their retweets and use of @.
The fourth reason they gave was spamming.
About five times a week I use Split Tweet to send out a tweet to all my accounts to inform my followers of the progress of the growth of my accounts.
This tweet invariably contains my URL.
This is clearly a mistake, if I made any.
I could have done this if I had manually posted this tweet to each account.
Now it seems to me their are two types of user on Twitter.
There is the communication, social aspect user who uses their tweets to communicate with friends.
I have no problem with this and it appears neither does Twitter.
There is a large growing second group who use Twitter as a means of marketing, themselves and their business.
I am firmly in the second group and firmly believe that Twitter is one of the most revolutionary marketing tools ever to be invented.
Now although Twitter obviously recognised that it might be used for self promotion and some marketing they totally underestimated the ingenuity of its users and the extent to which it would be used by business large or small.
They do seem to have a problem with this as a bit like Google, this sort of use was not part of their rather quaint masterplan! Now it seems to me that the two types of twitter users do not have to mix or be at odds.
The beauty of Following is that you can opt out or even block, so why the objections? There are many other abuses that break the Twitter Rules without question or subjective judgement.
One example is porn - I can guarantee that at least one of your followers is a porn site, vary rarely disguised as anything else.
There are lots of real spammers, flooding the pages with long lists of duplicate tweets blatantly advertising products.
There is the use of foul language and often obscenity, particularly amongst the Social users.
It is interesting therefore that they choose the penalty for relatively minor offences can be suspension of one or more accounts.
They actually suspended my first account almost 4 weeks ago.
I immediately stopped all actions on the rest of my accounts, no following, no flushing, no tweets.
I appealed and within a week the account was reinstated after I had given an assurance that I would not use auto follow software.
Within a further 2 days they took down 16 accounts and subsequently dismissed my appeals.
I still did nothing to either the remaining account or the reinstated account.
Two weeks later they took down the remaining account, I now wait to see whether they will revoke the reinstatement of my remaining account! Interestingly I have launched 9 other new accounts but done nothing with them other than set them up.
The first of those new accounts was suspended today.
The conclusion I have come to is that they track multiple ownership through IP addresses.
There is no other link to me on the new account.
It is clear that Twitter Rules should not be disobeyed and that any "quoted" limits in terms of rates of Following or Unfollowing should be approached with extreme caution.
The other area of what constitutes linkage of different should also be approached with extreme caution.
However none of them are particularly specific and it then places a somewhat subjective view on its own rules.
I have lost 18 Twitter accounts in the past 2 weeks and after appeal had one reinstated.
The net effect of this action by Twitter was that I have lost not only 110000 Followers but that it has also slowed down my dreams of total Twitter domination.
I have conservatively grown each of these accounts - never inviting more than 500 new followers per day, per identity and only unfollowing every 3 days and then never by more than 300.
The primary reason for suspending these accounts was over aggressive following! They also said I should cease to use automatic follow and unfollow tools.
I use no such tools as they cost money.
I am however reconsidering this as the sales of Hummingbird and Tweetadder, to name but two, indicate that these tools are indeed been used by many people without penalty! I use Social Oomph solely as an autoresponder for the initial thank you tweet and I have it set on unfollowto flush those who do not follow after 3 days.
All my following is done manually using Buzzom, which I also use as the Flushing tool.
The second reason they gave for suspending the accounts was use of multiple accounts.
Twitter specifically allows multiple accounts.
I have never attempted to mask my identity in each of my accounts, unlike many others, but it would appear that honesty does not pay.
I will alias my accounts in future! It would appear that their software clearly picks up the duplicate identities but not the IP addresses.
The third reason they gave for suspending the accounts was too high a proportion of automated tweets as opposed to personal tweets.
I do give my followers a regular supply of news items automatically which are relevant to my followers interests and are of much higher quality than I can supply.
My followers appreciated this supply of information which I can gauge by their retweets and use of @.
The fourth reason they gave was spamming.
About five times a week I use Split Tweet to send out a tweet to all my accounts to inform my followers of the progress of the growth of my accounts.
This tweet invariably contains my URL.
This is clearly a mistake, if I made any.
I could have done this if I had manually posted this tweet to each account.
Now it seems to me their are two types of user on Twitter.
There is the communication, social aspect user who uses their tweets to communicate with friends.
I have no problem with this and it appears neither does Twitter.
There is a large growing second group who use Twitter as a means of marketing, themselves and their business.
I am firmly in the second group and firmly believe that Twitter is one of the most revolutionary marketing tools ever to be invented.
Now although Twitter obviously recognised that it might be used for self promotion and some marketing they totally underestimated the ingenuity of its users and the extent to which it would be used by business large or small.
They do seem to have a problem with this as a bit like Google, this sort of use was not part of their rather quaint masterplan! Now it seems to me that the two types of twitter users do not have to mix or be at odds.
The beauty of Following is that you can opt out or even block, so why the objections? There are many other abuses that break the Twitter Rules without question or subjective judgement.
One example is porn - I can guarantee that at least one of your followers is a porn site, vary rarely disguised as anything else.
There are lots of real spammers, flooding the pages with long lists of duplicate tweets blatantly advertising products.
There is the use of foul language and often obscenity, particularly amongst the Social users.
It is interesting therefore that they choose the penalty for relatively minor offences can be suspension of one or more accounts.
They actually suspended my first account almost 4 weeks ago.
I immediately stopped all actions on the rest of my accounts, no following, no flushing, no tweets.
I appealed and within a week the account was reinstated after I had given an assurance that I would not use auto follow software.
Within a further 2 days they took down 16 accounts and subsequently dismissed my appeals.
I still did nothing to either the remaining account or the reinstated account.
Two weeks later they took down the remaining account, I now wait to see whether they will revoke the reinstatement of my remaining account! Interestingly I have launched 9 other new accounts but done nothing with them other than set them up.
The first of those new accounts was suspended today.
The conclusion I have come to is that they track multiple ownership through IP addresses.
There is no other link to me on the new account.
It is clear that Twitter Rules should not be disobeyed and that any "quoted" limits in terms of rates of Following or Unfollowing should be approached with extreme caution.
The other area of what constitutes linkage of different should also be approached with extreme caution.
Source...