My good friend, and fellow blogger on Dream Systems Media, Janet Meiners (aka Newspapergrl) had an interesting experience getting suspended on Twitter a few months back, and I want to take the time to talk about her experience and share how people can now, never have to worry about this happening to them.
Here is Janet’s story:
I twitter every day and have been building a network there for over a year. First it was a way to talk to friends and follow what was happening in my industry. Then it became a valuable networking tool for my business. One day a few months ago, I logged on and my password didn’t work. I tried again, same issue. I was sure it was the right password.
I went to my twitter account page, www.newspapergrl.com and it said, “this account has been suspended for suspicious activity…nothing to see here, mozy along” or something simliar. My first response was panic. Later it was anger.
Several people told me I’d get back on quickly. I contacted another friend through Facebook who had the same thing happen to her. She said she was still banned and it had been several weeks. I started to think this might not be resolved as quickly as I hoped. Maybe it wouldn’t ever be. Luckily, I had reserved the more logical version of my profile name: newspapergirl. I thought I’d start over.
In a chat with another friend who had been banned I wrote: “If we get back on we need to backup our account so we could recreate it. I wish Twitter would just charge us for services instead of having to go elsewhere.”
Here’s a piece of an IM conversation I had about it.
friend: DID YOU GET SUSPENDED ON TWITTER TOO???? DAMN THEM!
9:08 PM me: YES
DID YOU???
friend: yes.
sucks
me: no way
friend: yes way
I could start a new network, but I had so much history, so much content that I couldn’t piece back together. I couldn’t remember all the people I was following or who followed me.
Finally I contacted friends asking them to vouch for me. A few days later I logged back in. Since then several of my friends have been banned. Once your account is gone you realize how valuable it is to you and how much work and time it would take
to rebuild if you lost it.
The end of Janet’s story and the beginning of mine.
After hearing Janet’s story I started asking myself the question — how valuable is my Twitter account? and what would I do if I lost my account, it got hacked, or it was suspended. It’s not like Twitter is just suspending accounts for good reasons here and there, you can read this article from Jesse Stay at Stay N’ Alive where he talked about Twitter suspending accounts by the hundreds of thousands for no apparent reason. Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done until I found out that Bloggled offers a Twitter backup feature that allowed me to totally back up my Twitter account, followers and all. The process is simple and painless and give me some comfort knowing that if something crazy does happen I have a Twitter back up to fall back on.
Matt,
Yes, I need to get bloggled. My Twitter account was back so quickly that I didn’t back up my account (yet). I’ll let you know how it goes.
Janet
.-= Janet´s last blog ..The Biggest Challenge for an Internet Marketer =-.
@Janet
Thanks for sharing your story here and hopefully more people see that they have options!
Thats crazy! I haven’t bumped into anyone that has had their account shut off but I’m sure they will start doing it more as they get bigger and bigger. As long as they don’t get crazy like Facebook. They shut your account off if you use the search bar too much.
.-= Nick Stamoulis´s last blog ..Is Yahoo! Answers Really An SEO Tool? =-.
@Nick Stamoulis
Facebook shuts off your account if you use it to much? I have never heard of that? That is crazy!!!
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Wow, that is amazing. I just recently contacted News Paper Girl inquiring about her services, and she is definitely legit. Tooo weird
@Nick Stamoulis
Nick, I use facebook’s search bar all the time and haven’t seen any problems with using it too frequent. You must be using it like every 1-2 seconds or something that would throw up bot filters…right?
.-= Noah´s last blog ..Tour de France and Entrepreneurship =-.
@Joel McLaughlin
Yea, she is for reals and legit! I would suggest her to anyone that is in need of a good PR person! JANET ROCKS!!
read books … there is no alternative to that