Fours Things to Avoid So Your Twitter Account Isn’t Closed

You’ve been having a great run so far with your Twitter marketing campaign, but what if your account were shut down, right out of the blue, and with no prior warning? Yikes! Such circumstances certainly spell terrible news, yet they are still an all-too-familiar experience for a growing number of Twitter users, and most especially among the marketing set. The niceties and not-so-niceties of this profession are fraught with particularly explosive components in terms of things that can catch the gaze of alert, eagle-eyed censoring/quality-control authorities. Start up your creativity so that you can continue to make use of these components, but in ways that will not get you in trouble.

More specifically, the accounts of marketers are more prone to being closed because they are the group of individuals most likely to do such thing as: (1) post duplicate updates, (2) put up links with no additional (personal) information, and (3) start following or unfollowing at massive paces. A fourth tweeting behavior that will get you in trouble (read: get your account suspended) is not abiding by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — but the perils of this last faux pas are more equitably distributed among the Twitter populations. Either way, you don’t want to be caught violating any part of this long treatise that was ever so neatly typed up back in the depths of 1998.

So what is it about marketers’ profession that sets them up so patly for a censoring spree from the powers-that-be of internet sociability? For starters, it’s that singular profession’s demands for massive outreach. Staying truly connected is tough, everybody knows that, but marketers don’t just want to connect with loads of people — marketers also want to engage these people in ways that make them willing to spend money or effort on the cause the marketer is most currently championing. It’s certainly a tough order, but these are not folks who easily back away from a challenge.

If you’re in marketing, use Twitter, and don’t want to end up with a lost account, keep in mind the four points made above. You’re ingenuity is the limit when it comes to social media outreach, but don’t overstep any legally established lines.