What To Do If Your Twitter Account Has Been Suspended
Your Twitter account has been suspended. You're confused and angry and want answers. You're not alone; this is becoming a frequent occurrence and Twitter admin like to hide behind some fairly nebulous terms of service.
The bottom line is that Twitter reserves the right “to refuse service to anyone for any reason at anytime.”. They can suspend your account for any reason without telling you why. If you know why you're account has been suspended then you probably won't need to read this and can merrily go ahead and create another account. If you're afraid of losing the network you have established and any reputation you feel you have gained then read on.
Twitter has gone from a lowly start-up to a major online presence in a short time, but their resources are just not keeping up with their new status. This seems to be affecting both their physical resources such as servers and bandwidth as well as their human resources such as their help system. If you feel that you need to use Twitter then you will have to protect yourself from account suspension and the consequences that arise from it, but that's for another article.
One example of this is that Twitter's help pages have a number of dead links. This look bad and means having to go the long way round to find out how to complain about your account suspension. There seem to be two ways to seek to get your account reinstated.
Twitter Support
Twitter Support currently uses the Zendesk platform to generate help tickets and (hopefully) answer them. This means they have two URLs that point to the same place:
http://help.twitter.com/entries
http://twitter.zendesk.com/entries
If they ever stop using Zendesk then the first URL should still work.
If your account has recently been suspended and has not been deleted then you can login to this helpdesk with the same details as your Twitter account. Some people have found it expedient to create another Twitter account and use those details to open tickets about their suspended account. This can be useful as some users have found they can no longer login to the helpdesk if their Twitter account was terminated. The downside is that if Twitter upholds the original account suspension then you may find your new account also targeted. This choice is yours.
Online companies often hide behind the anonymity the internet affords them and Twitter is no different. You will firstly receive an automated response, which merely means a human may eventually look at your case. Most people's reaction is to then send an angry reply. From reading some people's stories the best way to get your suspended account reinstated is to make a clear logical case that you have done nothing against Twitter's TOS.
Mistakes happen and there are unpleasant people out there who want to take you off the net just because they don't like your politics, religion, race, sexual orientation or whatever. There are also spam rings on Twitter and if you unfortunately follow one of them accidentally you may be flagged as part of the ring. Whatever the reason for your suspension you might, or might not, get to know and can then act upon it either with a new account or your reinstated account.
Get Satisfaction
The second place where you can complain about your Twitter account suspension is at Get Satisfaction. This is similar to Zendesk but has the advantage that it is also a forum and other users can comment on your case and share experiences. This means you're not alone in dealing with Twitter and can see who has been reinstated and who hasn't.
Get satisfaction also has a section of Twitter Known Issues. This lists known bugs on Twitter that have led to various account problems such as the inability to login, tweets or followers gone missing and accounts accidentally blocked. If you had a lot of followers you can try to get them to support your reinstatement here. That, however, assumes you've kept an offline list of your followers: how many people do that?
Will you get your Twitter account reinstated?
Maybe, maybe not.
How long will it take?
How long is an elastic band? They seem woefully under-staffed and have seen accounts reinstated after 2 months!
Is it worth the aggravation?
That really depends on how much effort you've put into your Twitter community. If you really feel you haven't done anything wrong then it is worth pursuing as otherwise you're likely to fall into the same trap with a new account.
Where can I find Twitter's Terms of Service?
Here are Twitter's Terms of Service and Rules Policies. The section that probably affects most people is their Twitter Rules page.
Good luck... just don't hold your breath waiting.
Showing posts with label twitter tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twitter tools. Show all posts
Are the Trending Topics on Twitter a Waste of Time?
Twitter has been busy messing around with its user interface. It recently added the latest Trending Topics in its right-hand column, just below the Search box. The Trending Topics shows the top ten keywords currently in use. If one looks at a third-party application such as Twopular you'll get a more detailed view of the trends but it is fairly consistent with Twitter's own calculations. However, how useful is Twitter Trends and how does it compare to Google Trends?
Google's own Hot Trends is based on actual searches. The full algorithm is somewhat of a secret and the data given does not indicate how this calculation is performed. What one can assume is that the Hot Trends are those keywords whose search numbers are above their norm. They therefore tend to be news-related keywords and even a small but sudden increase in searches can lead to a listing in the Hot Trends. Apart from a serious burst of viral marketing it isn't easy to manipulate what Google is tracking. After all, once you click on a keyword there is absolutely no reason to then go and search for the same word unless you really want some further background information that is not available at the links already provided by Google.
In contrast, if you click on a keyword in Twitter's Trends what you'll see are dozens of identical tweets, often retweeting (RT) the same message over and over again. However, what you also find are lots of spammy tweets that have taken the trending keyword and then inserted it into a tweet about something completely different! On Twitter there are two types of keywords: one is a keyword string extracted from tweet texts, somewhat like Google does; and the other are hash tags such as #hottrends. The hash tags are useful for defining a subject across many tweets but what one finds is that most trending keywords on twitter are hash tags rather than contextual keywords.
Finding short-term trends can be useful to those writers who like to ambulance-chase the latest buzzy topics in the hope of increased traffic and earnings. But this somewhat relies on the trending data being genuine and not subject to mass manipulation. Tweets are so short that it is impossible to tell whether a message is really about the keyword or not. As often happens with any list across the web, such as social bookmarking lists, there is always a tipping point. If you can sneak into the bottom of the list this often gives you a leg up to the next level. Hover just below this cut-off point and you could easily fall back down again. people are lazy - they'll look at the most obvious thing first.
But on Twitter, getting a subject on its Trending Topics is liable to be swamped with spam and unrelated garbage. Yes, you will also find the original tweet being resent by lots of people but what you don't seem to get is a stream of any discussion that is taking place. Perhaps I'm the only one who thinks this is a problem, but what was supposed to be a good idea is just too easy to abuse.
Google's own Hot Trends is based on actual searches. The full algorithm is somewhat of a secret and the data given does not indicate how this calculation is performed. What one can assume is that the Hot Trends are those keywords whose search numbers are above their norm. They therefore tend to be news-related keywords and even a small but sudden increase in searches can lead to a listing in the Hot Trends. Apart from a serious burst of viral marketing it isn't easy to manipulate what Google is tracking. After all, once you click on a keyword there is absolutely no reason to then go and search for the same word unless you really want some further background information that is not available at the links already provided by Google.
In contrast, if you click on a keyword in Twitter's Trends what you'll see are dozens of identical tweets, often retweeting (RT) the same message over and over again. However, what you also find are lots of spammy tweets that have taken the trending keyword and then inserted it into a tweet about something completely different! On Twitter there are two types of keywords: one is a keyword string extracted from tweet texts, somewhat like Google does; and the other are hash tags such as #hottrends. The hash tags are useful for defining a subject across many tweets but what one finds is that most trending keywords on twitter are hash tags rather than contextual keywords.
Finding short-term trends can be useful to those writers who like to ambulance-chase the latest buzzy topics in the hope of increased traffic and earnings. But this somewhat relies on the trending data being genuine and not subject to mass manipulation. Tweets are so short that it is impossible to tell whether a message is really about the keyword or not. As often happens with any list across the web, such as social bookmarking lists, there is always a tipping point. If you can sneak into the bottom of the list this often gives you a leg up to the next level. Hover just below this cut-off point and you could easily fall back down again. people are lazy - they'll look at the most obvious thing first.
But on Twitter, getting a subject on its Trending Topics is liable to be swamped with spam and unrelated garbage. Yes, you will also find the original tweet being resent by lots of people but what you don't seem to get is a stream of any discussion that is taking place. Perhaps I'm the only one who thinks this is a problem, but what was supposed to be a good idea is just too easy to abuse.
Twitter Tweak Ruffles Feathers
A small tweak in Twitter's default settings has many users up in arms. Most newbies will probably not even know what all the fuss is about.
Before the recent change, the default setting for what you could see included tweets between two people if you were already following both of them, but not if you were just following one of them. However, Twitter did include the option of changing this default to allow users to see all the correspondence sent out by those they were following. For many, this was too much stream of consciousness, but others enjoyed watching a whole debate develop. This latter option has been removed!
What this also does is remove the more serendipitous nature of finding people with common interests and views. It is often the case that seeing a reply from A to B - where you're following A - will lead to looking at B's profile and possibly thereby following B as well. The new changes mean this will happen less. The full feed is available if one goes to A's user profile or the global timeline, but that isn't the best way of using Twitter.
Nobody seems entirely sure why Twitter has done this. Bandwidth problems?! But the Twitter management is now finding their communication tool being directed at them.
Before the recent change, the default setting for what you could see included tweets between two people if you were already following both of them, but not if you were just following one of them. However, Twitter did include the option of changing this default to allow users to see all the correspondence sent out by those they were following. For many, this was too much stream of consciousness, but others enjoyed watching a whole debate develop. This latter option has been removed!
What this also does is remove the more serendipitous nature of finding people with common interests and views. It is often the case that seeing a reply from A to B - where you're following A - will lead to looking at B's profile and possibly thereby following B as well. The new changes mean this will happen less. The full feed is available if one goes to A's user profile or the global timeline, but that isn't the best way of using Twitter.
Nobody seems entirely sure why Twitter has done this. Bandwidth problems?! But the Twitter management is now finding their communication tool being directed at them.
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