One of the Twitter personalities I have been following is Sam Freedom who found one day his account had been suspended. It turns out from support there are several reasons this happens, mainly:
- you’ve followed a large number of people in a short amount of time
- there is a small number of followers compared to number of people you’re following
- the updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
- a large number of users blocking the profile and writing in with spam complaints
Now, I don’t know the details, so I don’t know why this particular case happened, but it seems the first three could apply to over half of the people I follow.
What do you do when you first join Twitter? You add all your friends then go around following people that look interesting or fun. So most of us are guilty of #1 already in our first days of being a Twitter user.
Again with #2, if you are new or not particularly well known, for quite a while the people you follow is going to be a far higher number than those that follow you.
I can fully understand the last two. Most people want to see human conversation at least a good percentage of the time rather than 100% spam or links, but they do not seem to be clamping down on the links so much. Many, many bloggers are using software to post their feed right to Twitter for promotion. Some big blogs. Rather than being junked, they are gathering loads of followers.
For me #4 must be the overriding factor. If you do all the above but get zero complaints I suggest you should be fine. After all, if you don’t like someone stop following them, right?
That being said, it seems the advice should be to grow organically and make sure you mix chatty updates in with your links.
You don’t want to put lots of effort into your Twitter account only to find it doesn’t work any more!