It is true Twitter can be time consuming and it is compelling to use or try any of the thousands of Twitter applications available to save yourself time, add followers quickly or automate your tweets.
Before you do, you may want to learn about Twitter’s best practices that help prevent your account from being removed from searches, or in some cases suspended. Twitter may automatically remove accounts engaging in what they consider aggressive behaviors in order to ensure the best experience for everyone.
Twitter cautions against aggressive behaviors and suggests that you stay away from:
1) Repeatedly posting duplicate or near-duplicate content (links or tweets) – Be kind to your followers, no one wants to see the same tweets repeatedly. If for example your trying to get traffic back to a new blog post change the content of your tweets so that they are fresh, and interesting. If you do try to tweet duplicate tweets, Twitter will actually prevent the tweet from posting. Therefore, you are automatically compelled to change the content.
2) Abusing trending topics or hashtags (topic words with a # sign) – This is not the way to promote your business or cause. Abusing hashtags or hijacking hashtags is not only annoying to followers, but it is a red flag to Twitter that you are not practicing good Twitter etiquette.
3) Sending automated tweets or replies – This seems like the easiest way to “set your Twitter account and forget it.” Many Twitter applications provide automated tweets and replies but you can guarantee that all your tweets will be removed from searches. Getting found is the point of social media and Twitter, without it you might as well be invisible. And consider this, if everyone is on automated tweeting, then who are you to “engage” with, and “build relationships” with?
4) Using bots or applications to post similar messages based on keywords – This is similar to automating your tweets, and if you are to be that disingenuous about your tweets, then your are not following the rules of social media.
5) Posting similar messages over multiple accounts – I see this in my Twitter stream all the time. How authentic are you if you are Tweeting from multiple accounts? I also noticed that these type of twitters most often are using an application to automate those tweets. This type of activity means you have no engagement, no trust, and followers will likely un-follow you quickly, like I do.
6) Aggressively following and un-following people – There are hundreds of applications offering mass following and un-following, not to mention the “How to get Follower’s Fast” spam tweets. No one needs that many followers overnight, in fact there is a movement to have 1000 or less followers. That is considered the magic number of loyal followers anyone needs to have a strong social media program. So do not worry about how many followers you can “get” overnight.
I hope that by learning these best practices I have saved you from being removed from searches, and potentially suspended from Twitter. You can learn more about Twitter best practices, and Twitter rules at the Twitter Help section.
