How I Finally Got My Twitter Account Reinstated

I had pretty much given up on getting Twitter to either reinstate (unsuspend) my account or at least explain why it was suspended in the first place.  My account was suspended on Nov 4th, and no one had responded to my multiple queries through their contact form.

Then late yesterday afternoon, I decided to google, “Twitter account suspension” and found a site called, “Customer Service & Support for Twitter” that claimed that 23 Twitter employees were ready to listen and respond. 

On the site, I found a number of other people whose accounts had been suspended, and some of them had now been unsuspended. So I figured I had nothing to lose, and posted my tale of woe.

Low and behold, a few hours later, I received an email from Del at Twitter that said:

“I took a look at your account and unsuspended it; it looks as though it had gotten clustered in with a number of other accounts that were spammy.”

Now I’m not really sure if he was saying that my account was spammy, but I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I opened Twitter, and sure enough, my account was live again!

While I’m grateful to Del, I’m a little bit concerned, because a number of people whose accounts had been reinstated came back to that site and said they were suspended again. I guess I’ll just have to see how it goes.

But I do worry about Twitter as a viable company. They’ve gotten some nice investment money, but I don’t think they’re doing a good job keeping up with their growth. And they’re trying to find some revenue model to monetize the site and keep growing. Without good customer service, they’ll never make it. Maybe it is growing pains and they’re getting their act together. We’ll see.

In the meantime, while I was suspended, I tried to understand what I could have done wrong. Through this process, I learned which activities might get you banned on Twitter.  So take heed:

One or more of these things may cause a Twitter account to be flagged for review:

• a large number of people block the profile in question
• a large number of people write in with spam complaints for a specific profile
•  a large number of people are followed in a short amount of time
•  the number of followers is small compared to number of people following
•  updates consist of duplicate links and/or text
•  updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
•  updates consist solely of “re-tweets” (poaching other users’ updates)
•  updates consist of links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
•   a large number of accounts is created in a short amount of time
•  an account is identified as belonging to a group of spam accounts

Anyway, I’ll continue with Twitter, but I’m a little less enchanted.

What do you think?