I’m very happy that i’ve got my timeline back and that it wasn’t my fault. Anyway, i still can feel a rest of the bitter taste i wrote about in the post “5 things i’ve learned from my twitter suspension“…

But let’s look into the future. I’m glad to be back and after all i enjoyed the week twitter-off.

Here is what you should do to get your twitter account back in case of a suspension…

Is it your fault or not?

You will know by yourself if it’s your own fault or not when you find your twitter suspended.

Really, there are only 2 possible thoughts: “Woops, i knew they’d catch me one day!” or “WTF? Why me?”

I thought WTF, why me? because i knew i had done nothing wrong on twitteritwitter. But it seems that even if you were bad, using auto-follow tools and/or other shit, you can get your account back.

Keep cool and be patient!

Rule number one is to stay relaxed, don’t go atomic. And of course, don’t blame twitter when you already know that you played the bad guy.

When your account is suspended you can log in anyway. Twitter provides you with a link where you can open a support ticket. Do that. Fill everything out and give a short explanation.

Again, be friendly, be professional and always remember that there is a living person on the other side.

The top 3 official reasons for a twitter suspension!

After sending the ticket you will receive an automatic email response. It will again give you basic information, tell you 3 main reasons why your account was suspended.

1. The use of auto-follow tools! You know, those external twitter services that make any boring dumbass get tens of thousands followers. You need to remove such tools and confirm that you never show up bad (aggressive) following behavior ever again. In case you are blocked because of this, you already received another email with further info. If you didn’t receive this second mail, check out the next point…
2. Is there anything else you are to blame for? Never read the official Twitter rules? Read them now. If it goes “Woops, i didn’t know i wasn’t allowed to do this!” tell twitter about it and say sorry…
3. If you still cannot find any reason for the suspension, it’s most probably only an error. These things can happen even on twitter…

In any case you must reply to that email by using the same address. Only this will open the ticket again and make the twitter support look closer at your account!

Enjoy your twitter-off!

Now the only thing you can do is wait. There’s no need to take action. You can see in your account that the support ticket is still open. You will receive another email when the problem is resolved.

I’ve read somewhere that it can take up to 2 months. Fortunately in my case it took only 6 days to bring my twitter back on track.

I don’t think that it makes sense to open another ticket and fire at the support. I think they have lots to do in these days.

I only can recommend to enjoy a few days twitter-off. Take your time to think about the tweeps and the honey, the tweets in the trees… and everything will be alright.

I’m sorry for that and i don’t have an explanation. I’m absolutely sure that the suspension must be a mistake and of course i try to get my tweets and tweeps back.

The trouble is, i was ill for about a week and not online during that time. When i came back last Wednesday i found my twitter account closed. I haven’t received an email from twitter, telling me about the reasons…

Today, 3 days later, and after filing the required support ticket, following all the instructions, i still don’t know the reason for the suspension and whether or not – and when – twitter will correct its mistake.

I’ve just read somewhere that it can take up to 2 months to reopen a suspended twitter account. This would be terrible! I ask myself, is twitter really worth waiting?

Read more about the 5 things i’ve learned from my twitter suspension…

Don’t sell your soul to twitter!

What do i learn from this disaster? What am i to blame for?

Due to the suspension-affair i started to see twitter (aka social media services) with different eyes. I already knew that twitter isn’t perfect. All the spam issues and auto-follow tools that only build completely worthless follower lists and so on…

But when you suddenly find your own account on the black list of bad guys everything changes. You were a honest tweep but you had no chance to avoid the black listing.

So i took my sad and angry feelings and tried to turn them into something constructive. Positive thinking, hahaha!

Thinking about my twitter account suspension!

1. When i think about my suspended twitter account i think about my friends. I’ve met many nice and interesting people on twitter, it’s really a mess that i can’t contact them anymore.
2. The time and effort i spend in creating a good followership manually, checking other people’s stuff, supporting them where ever i could… This all was actually a waste of emotions.
3. Subscribing to @spam and reporting bad accounts seems to be completely useless. I smell a rat. Is it the fault of my own block/report behavior that my account was suspended?
4. When you follow more than 2.000 people you will always read something interesting when you look at your timeline. This source of information and inspiration just dried out.
5. Twitter is a (not so) good service to promote your own works. But how many click-through will your 2.500+ followers generate? Time to look at the stats and be honest.

So what have i learned due to my twitter account suspension?

1. Don’t trust twitter

Twitter provides you with the list-feature, you can fav tweets and do other things to stay close to your friends. But this is only twitter intern and not safe because twitter can block your account for no reason at anytime.

So never forget to bookmark your friend’s websites the classical way! You need a neutral place to contact your friends at anytime you want. Don’t trust twitter or other social media services when it comes to friendship/business contacts.

I still know the twitter names of my best friends but i am to blame because i trusted too much in twitter’s internal bookmark mechanisms.

2. Don’t waste emotions

I don’t like living in the past, i don’t look back. But a bitter resume of my current suspension-affair is, that i spent countless hours of my lifetime – for nothing than an automatic and uninformative support ticket response.

If i were evil i would say “Hey, what the fuck, let’s open another twitter profile, subscribe to a dozen auto-follow tools and tweet only automated shit and sponsored links all of the time! I’ll be a twitter rockstar quickly!”

But i am not that evil. I still believe in fair play, the good will counts, the internet is not bad, peace and love, flowers and happiness. But…

I can’t recommend twitter if you are a very emotional person. In case something goes wrong – and you won’t be able to see it coming – the feelings you spent and shared on twitter will be lost.

3. Why blocking and reporting?

Now i know that there really is something wrong in the system. I knew that before but i didn’t expect that my harmless account also could be suspended like some shitty spam. It’s really painful.

You know, i’ve once created a private list “Blacklist”. I’ve put accounts i reported as spam in there to see what’s happening to them. For example, the guy who continued to re-follow me on a daily basis to appear on top of my followers page. I gave him a few warnings then i reported him. You know what? He’s still active and continuing doing shit with other people. I checked it out, have seen it with my own eyes.

Another story: About 4 weeks ago i was followed by about 20 spam accounts over night. You know, all with the same characteristic: meaningless naming, no tweets but already a few hundreds of followers, always the same retarded bio. I’ve reported them all and already knew it was critical to do so. What if the person behind those numerous spam-accounts would find out and let his 20+ spam-accounts report me? Woot!

Also an interesting aspect is that twitter’s reporting button is pretty simple and effective on the good side… But it doesn’t care about who hits it on the bad side! A real spammer, a religious freak, a fanatic, an extremist, hacker, whatever individual or robot – the Block and Report buttons don’t make a difference between good and bad. Chances are too high that the wrong persons will be beaten. Well, i’m my account is not the only victim, there must be thousands.

Fighting spam on twitter seems to be like fighting a war you cannot win.

4. There must be other places to get information and inspiration!

Reading a well filled twitter timeline is very informative and entertaining. It’s never boring.

But hey, there are other places to get satisfaction! And after all, i must realize that many (most?) hot news and sexy links that have been tweeted are only second-hand! Warmed up and retweeted over and over again.

I recently filled my Google Reader with a number of good old RSS-Feeds. That’s first-hand information directly delivered from the source, hot enough to gain my attention without any tweet between.

Twitter is only one small piece of the information cake. And somebody already scratched the chocolate off.

5. Does promotional use of twitter always work well?

What is promotional use in my case? I tweeted about and linked to my own sites maybe 3 times a day. Sometimes not, sometimes maybe 5 times. I tweeted about other people’s stuff much more often. I didn’t want to over-promote my own projects and always tried to find a good balance.

My homepage link led to a landing page that i’ve created for my social media contacts. There they can learn more about me and my works and can easier decide if they want to follow me or not. That’s basically all i did to push my works into the spotlight.

With more than 2.500 hand-selected followers you might think twitter would be a great traffic generator. To tell a long story short: I checked my site stats for the last 2 weeks. In the first week i wasn’t active on twitter because of my illness. Visitor count shows no change. In the second week my twitter account was suspended. Still no markable change in the stats of my sites.

This tells me clearly that twitter does not play a big role for me. In fact, i could give it up and would not lose a single visitor on my sites. So why should i care?

If you want professionally promote your business on twitter, realize that you’re only one between millions and your tweets are only a few between billions. And many only care about their own stuff and not yours.

A resume

I keep on trying to get my twitter profile back on track. Next week i will open another support ticket and keep on waiting. To be honest, i’m not expecting things to turn out well. As an act of preparation i already removed all twitter links from my sites.

But i take it relatively easy, because i’ve learned from the suspension-affair that twitter is not too important. I don’t need it to promote my works. I don’t need it to get information. I don’t need it to support people. There are other and possibly better sites for guys like me. Somehow i even will be able to re-connect with my best twitter friends…

The waste of time, effort and emotions still leaves a bitter taste on my tongue. Fuck! I could do much better things with my lifetime. It’s my fault that i was twitter-blind. In the future i will wear better glasses.

For now i wish everybody a nice day. It’s warm outside and i’m going to get some ice cream. That’s life!

The message also says i should not tweet about it yet, and so i kept the secret. But when i hit “twitter lists” into the twitter search today i realized that the top-secret beta-feature isn’t top-secret anymore.

Everybody seems to talk about twitter lists already! Even some big tech bloggers turned out to be hysteric and just started to tweet and post without thinking. Hey, thanks for posting wrong things and just “forgetting” about the Beta-Status. And congratulations for the traffic…

In fact, twitter has no reason to keep “lists” undercover. It’s a cool feature and i can understand people’s hysteria.

So why not writing a blog post – not a tweet – about it? My conscience is clear…

Thank you Twitter!

At first i want to thank the twitter team for allowing me to be one of the beta testers. It’s truly a honor and shows me that the way i’m using twitter is a “good” way. It was about time that someone noticed :-)

Another thanks goes to twitter because they finally built something really innovative and useful…

With lists you can categorize the people you follow. For example, you can fill a list with your worst friends, virtual sex partners, coolest spammers or other groups of lovely people.

The way you create and edit lists, and the way how you put “followings” into a list, is pretty simple and self-explaining. The twitter experience will not become more complicated, it will become easier.

Some facts about twitter’s list feature!

Attention here, the facts i’m telling you are not officially confirmed yet. It’s only a first overview, a small – and probably – incomplete collection of features. Everything’s Beta.

• Lists can be private or public. You can change this anytime.
• You can follow whole lists of other tweeps.
• The url for lists is: twitter.com/username/listname
• You can also take @username/listname for the usual tweeting.
• You can see in how many list you appear yourself.
• You can put tweeps into a list without following them.
• … … …

I’ve also read somewhere that you can create up to 20 lists with up to 500 tweeps inside each. Other people say there is no limit. Don’t ask me, i don’t care.

This is how twitter lists look like (beta):

1. I just wonder… When you read this fat message, what do you think: Is the list feature LIVE or BETA? Is twitter rolling it out or only testing? Hard question, isn’t it?
2. Here you can see in how many lists your own timeline appears.
3. Your lists are shown up in the sidebar. When you hover over the links, an arrow (5) appears that opens the list page.
4. Still an ugly broken “View all” link. I already sent feedback to twitter and wonder how long it will take to remove the wasted |

The list page:

When you click on the arrow link in the sidebar you open this clean and perfect list page…

Confusing parts:

But when you directly click on the list-link the list appears in the usual timeline area. This part is confusing:

While i still added 3 followings to this list, the message at the top tells me that there were no “users” and i should add some by visiting my following page.

Maybe i am too blind to see the deeper sense here. Anyway, this page needs improvement and explanation, i even don’t know if this timeline is required at all – since there is a fine list page.

Another problem is that i can’t remove tweeps from a list. The procedure is clear but doesn’t work. The related checkbox is already unchecked when i open it but the tweep is still in the list. Will put this into my next feedback mail…

Why using lists on twitter?

I think lists will make it much easier to stay closer to old fellows and super interesting gurus. Especially when you are following masses of people and some cool tweeps that don’t post too much.

I often think “Hey, what’s up with @****, long time no see” and then can’t find his/hers last tweep in the timeline. Or i just forgot how to write the name correctly.

Currently i’m testing the concept of putting new followings into a private list and see if they follow back. This makes it a bit easier to manage new connections…

I also noticed that you can put tweeps into a list without following them. This way it is possible to “spy” tweeps for a while to see if they are worth following. Or create a list with people who blocked you (not sure if that works) to blame them all together :)

But again, i have no clue if all these things were meant to work this way in the end. And apart from that there may be more important things for twitter too improve – @AlexaRPD reminded me. But that’s another story.

I only know that i will like twitter’s new list feature once when it is ready.

Don’t take it personally but i have a problem with your style. It’s not because of the things that you do – it’s because the way you do it.

Don’t worry, this is not another to-do-or-not-to-do-on-twitter list. I’ve read them all and all where crap. Oh, except my own one i’ve posted a couple of months ago ;-)

So this post goes to all the whatever-marketers who recently heard about twitter and think it’s a fat money making machine or playground for absurd promotion ideas. Or just foolish stuff…

I’m sure you are a nice person!

Let me tell you again that i have nothing against you in personal. You can do what you want. If you are a whore you want guys come to your website, register and chat with you. I have no problem with that.

If you are a affiliate marketer and send me a damn fine link i already know that you will earn money when i turn into a lead. It’s absolutely okay for me, because i show ads on my websites as well and i’m happy when people click on it…

There are some other user groups on twitter that simply trust the wrong people, follow the wrong concepts.

And their 1.000+ followers are not worth a single cent.

The wrong way to get followers!

No avatar, no bio, no tweets, nothing but thousands of followers - worth nothing.

There is no one right way to use twitter. You can use it to make money, loads of money, tons of money! There’s no problem about it.

The only thing that sucks is the way you try to get more followers! Many people do it wrong, they may have good intentions but simply use wrong methods.

1. The people on twitter!

The first thing you should understand is that most active members of the twittersphere know the internet very well. They probably know “web 2.0″ and its mechanisms better than you. Don’t try to fool the twitter-people with plump link-posting and the usual “I’m bored, come and watch me doing dirty things” shit.

2. Twitter is not Facebook!

I know that many pro-marketers compare twitter with facebook. But this may lead into a confusion. Yes, you can use both, twitter and facebook, to promote your products. But on twitter you won’t find pretty galleries, colorful applications and other typical elements – only 140 characters. This is completely different to facebook and requires completely different procedures to build a valuable followership.

3. Twitter is no over-night success!

Somebody has told you that you can be successful (whatever that means) on twitter only with a wave of a hand, a blink of an eye? Come on, you can’t be that dumb! It’s just a pretty idea, a sweet dream – like all the “get money for nothing and chicks for free” promises. Understood? Wake up, it takes time to connect with followers and i’m talking about months/years. I know you’ll hate me now but i’m telling the truth.

4. More-Followers Tools are not a good idea!

Here they are, promising you luck, success, hip lifestyle, cool gadgets and “Tons of new followers”. Those services are thorns in twitter’s side. Visit the official twitter blog and help pages to learn that such more-followers tools are not recommendable and often rated as insecure. Apart from that, it makes no sense to collect followers the automatic way – better connect with them!

5. You are easy to spot!

On twitter it’s relatively easy to spot a strange account. As long as they do me no harm i let them follow me but i will not follow back, of course. Just an example: You follow me, i come visiting your twitter timeline (that’s the page where all your tweets appear. Well, “Tweets” are the… okay, please read the twitter help pages), i notice that you already have about 1.000 followers but only 4 or 10 posts. I’m away before i can even think about following you back…

There are a few more reasons i can’t follow you back. After reading this post you are probably able to spot them by yourself. It’s nothing against you in personal. I only think that you are not posting valuable content, nothing that interests me. You can change the way you use twitter for your business and become a honest member of the community anytime. It’s up to you.

Take it seriously or twitter is a waste of time – for you, not for me.