It was 11:30 pm of November 29 when I received an email from Twitter Support (TS) with a subject: Your account has been suspended.   I was saddened when I began to read the content of the email.  It says that @mindofabeginner was suspended due to a violation of Terms of Service and the minimum suspension period is 1 week.  The violation was aggressive following or following large numbers of users in an attempt to attract attention to our own account.  TS explained further that following a large numbers of users can be annoying to other users and is a violation of the Twitter Rules.

Well, Twitter Support got us there.  We are indeed using 2 Automated Twitter Management Software – MarketMeSuite and Tweet Adder 3.0 – as mentioned in our previous post entitled: Twitter Limit (link).  We are using these apps to automate tweeting, following, following back, DM or direct messaging, sending Thank You messages for those following us back and searching certain followers that match our search criteria, of course with the main objective of introducing our blog to other people in every corner of the earth.  For less than a week, if I am not mistaken, we were able to follow 2000 twitter users and we got almost 300 followers.   We haven’t seen yet the result of using them when it comes to our blog’s traffic because the number of visits to our sites is not that high.  Although the site stats shows that twitter.com is our number 1 referrer.

We were given a chance to appeal the suspension and so we did.  But we need to state in our appeal that we will discontinue the use of any tool that helps us to automatically follow users if we are using one or if we are following large numbers of users manually, we need to include in our appeal that we are not going to do it anymore.

While waiting for Twitter’s reply, I created a new account with a name: thnklykabegnnr.  And guess what, I did not learn from the past experience.  I still use the 2 twitter management software for our new twitter account with the same objective and reason.  But I am now using them in moderation.  Before, with mindofabeginner account, we are following 1 thousand users a day (the maximum number of twitter users you can follow in a day), but now thnklykabegnnr is only following 50 users a day.  This is to prevent us being caught by Twitter again for violating the  terms of service – aggressive following.

After 2 days, December 1, we received a reply from Twitter that they have un-suspended mindofabeginner account.  I thought Twitter reset our account but it’s good to know that our followers are still there and the twitter users we are following are still there also.

Lesson learned: don’t overuse the power of MarketMeSuite and Tweet Adder. Don’t follow aggressively.  Don’t let your account appear to be a spam or doing any spam-like activities.

The following  can give us more information on how to avoid this experience we’ve got with Twitter:

• Following Limits and Best Pracitices
• Automation Rules and Best Practices

Please do note that the only automated following behaviour that Twitter allows is auto-follow-back or following a user after they have followed you.