Surviving a Twitter Suspension; Twice

Surviving a Twitter Suspension; Twice

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

From the outside, you think Twitter is just a great deal of people posting about what they ate for breakfast or pictures of their cats. While this activity is definitely visible on the site, there's definitely other meaningful connections happening. It is apparent that a key element for an individual or business to be successful, they must be popular. Twitter followers help amount this popularity and understanding this, I made the account for schematc but not without some frustration and headaches along the way.

As with any branding experience, I was delighted to find out that the URL has been matching throughout all the popular services without the need to remember underscores. I registered schematc and began researching how people end up with followers. My personal Twitter account has only about 100 followers, most of which are friends of mine so there was probably some solicitation on my part. The plan with the schematc account was to have people follow naturally through conversation on Twitter. I've been "active" on the account for about two weeks and have about 30 followers. "Active" means that when I was able to access the account I've been looking for things to comment on, retweet and otherwise interact with on the site. I say this because the during these past two weeks the account has been suspended, twice.

The first time was a nightmare as I was uneducated and inexperienced to this. You'll log into your account find a notification saying your account was suspended with a link to more information. The more information isn't really more information because it suggests that you broke one of the rules; without specifically mentioning which one. There's a link to contact support, where you'll need to send them a message. Make sure you select Deactivated Account and then change the first drop-down box to Suspended Account. Make the message a nice one. My first message was not so nice because of the frustration and initial research indicating that some suspended account never get reactivated which would ruin the brand I've been creating. I believe my delay the first time around may have been because of the tone.

Upon sending the message, you'll receive an e-mail which confirms you have sent support a message asking to contest suspension. The e-mail says to read the whole thing but the tl;dr version is that you should read the rules (which you did by now because that's what the first notification suggested) and remove prohibited content. You'll need to reply to this e-mail to reopen the support ticket and have someone review your account. In my case, I didn't know exactly what happened so I didn't know what to remove and explained my situation in the reply; nicely.

The following wait was a longer one, and especially for someone excited to get started with new followers it is especially difficult. In the interim, I continued researching other instances of invalid Twitter suspensions with some ending quickly and others resorting to a new account. I wasn't prepared to make a new account, so I tried a few suggestions that were mentioned on the internet. One of the suggestions was to use another account and contact @ginger or @delbius. I contacted @ginger first which was the recommended method and didn't receive a reply. The next day I contacted @delbius who seems to get more of these requests and also responds to them more often. What I didn't realize is that my account was reactivated around the time I messaged @delbius. I'm still not sure if either of them had anything to do with it since I never received a reply from either one. A bit later, an e-mail came in:

Hello,

Twitter has automated systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk. Unfortunately, it looks like your account got caught up in one of these spam groups by mistake.

I've restored your account; sorry for the inconvenience.

Please note that it may take an hour or so for your follower and following numbers to return to normal.

Thanks,

Support

So, everything was fine and I continued joining conversations by searching for things I might find interesting and relevant to comment on. Toward the end of the week, I noticed that the connection to Twitterfeed was severed. Twitterfeed is the internet recommended service to send syndicated posts to a Twitter account. I remembered setting it up in order for posts on schema.tc to be auto-posted to Twitter. I reconnected the account, headed back to Twitter and found I was suspended again! So now I've figured out the problem and let this be a lesson, do not use Twitterfeed. (see update below)

I went through the process again, this time a nicer message explaining my findings and also deleting my account at Twitterfeed to ensure it wouldn't happen again. And everything happened a bit quicker until I got the last e-mail, saying my account was restored. When I went to check my account, it still said it was suspended. The e-mail only mentions that the follower numbers would be affected but is otherwise normal. I sent a response back to that e-mail, simply stating that the account seemed to still be suspended and to please look into it (please makes it nice, right?) and also used my personal account to send a message to @support. Again in the meantime, I searched the internet for similar scenarios and found people who never got the account restored even after getting the mistake / restoration e-mail. However, the account is now restored.

This very post will be testing the service offered at dlvr.it, which has a similar service to Twitterfeed but across many different sites and uses its own URL shortener. I've used this service before with my personal account and didn't have the suspension issues so let's hope this is all resolved.

Update: My account was restored for a third time after trying to post via dlvr.it suspended it again. The last test was to manually post a link back to schema.tc in Twitter, and the account suspended. The services were not the problem, my site's URL was. Twitter (and many other places on the internet) believe the .tc extension is a spam address. Facebook has a better system for handling this by using a captcha to verify a human is posting, Twitter just outright suspends your account without telling you what the problem is. For the time being, the website schema.tc is unmentionable on Twitter and I've been trying to research how to verify the site so this doesn't happen. No luck yet.