Your Account Has Been Suspended

Those words you never want to hear on any social media site – but especially not on your precious Twitter account.   After all the time you have spent acquiring Followers and all the people you have been networking with – gone at the swipe of a tail feather by Twitter!

What do you do now?

Don’t give up!

In the email from Twitter which has informed you of the suspension there is a link to their Support Desk. Put in a support ticket immediately. The good thing is that usually the “time out” lasts 7 days – but who ever owns the account needs to request that Twitter lift the suspension or they will close the account down permanently if they get no response.

There is a bit of a witch hunt going on. Twitter is shutting down first and not even asking questions later. It’s up to you to contact them and plead your case. Your account could have been comprised and hacked into or you might have inadvertently done something that violated their ever changing Terms of Service.

Above all, if you want to get your account back, take action now

Submit a support ticket at Twitter Support.

Request that Twitter lift the suspension.

Ask why your account was suspended, how you violated the TOS and assure them that anything you have done was unintentially creating the violation and that you will abide by their directive.

Twitter has been clamping down on a couple of things – automated postings that are being abused by Internet Marketers and “churning”. Typically you can follow 1000 new people a day and unfollow as many as want but if you do it too fast or too often then you are in Twitter’s eyes churning. Churn in Twitter language is when you follow/unfollow faster than what they deem acceptable but if you look at their policies they don’t have an acceptable range of how many new followers you can have in a day or unfollow, that isn’t considered churning.

A colleague of mine who has grown his Twitter account naturally over about a one year timeframe to over 53,000 followers was suspended for a few days while Twitter checked things out. His account was reinstated in about a week without much explanation as to the violation.

Personally I think Twitter is setting the stage for paid accounts and will eventually lift how many folks you can follow/unfollow in a 24 hour period if you are will to pay for the service to do so.

Twitter is getting really, really serious about TOS violations.

My guess is they are doing a couple of things:

* Weeding out the spammers that post the same or similar postings over and over either with links to their website or similar capability (blogs – affiliate sites etc)
* Prepping the world for paid accounts – where folks that want to use Twitter as a leg of their marketing capabilities – will have to pay for the right to do so – this has been kicked around and I watched EV (CEO of Twitter) discuss this on TV a few weeks ago.

It appears now that there have been some accounts that were deleted permanently after Twitter determined that they were seriously violating their vague Terms of Service. One had nearly 100,000 followers after a year and wasn’t a happy camper to say the least.
I would also suggest the obvious:

* Mix it up ( do not use the same text – links etc ) over 20 or 30 tweets and never repeat them in a week’s time – even more would be ideal. No real logic for this but more of a common sense approach. The Twitter servers must be using some type of search/sort/comparison routines and the more data you give them (tweets/links) the least likely they will recognize a pattern. The decision to suspend an account has to be an automatic trigger, as Twitter only has 40 some odd folks working for them (total) and there is no way they can keep track of all the activity that folks are Tweeting and making a decision to shut an account down.

* Be careful with follow/unfollow churn – do not follow/unfollow a large number of folks in a short period of time. There is software that will do this but you can’t regulate how fast it does the follows/unfollows in a given period. Again mix it up – start/stop automated routines, use the Twitter web page to follow/unfollow – or stay under the Twitter radar of “no no’s” listed in their Terms of Service:

https://twitter.com/tos
http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/18311

* And never ever never give out your account id/password to a free site using an API which connects to your account. Should it be hacked, resold etc – your account could be shut down from activities totally out of your control.