The biggest mistake I made on Twitter & why it’s so bad

My brother and I both picked usernames on Twitter about 6 months ago.  I read blog posts and subscribe to newsletters about trends in the online world and when I started to see how Twitter was getting a lot of mention and really growing in popularity I decided I better grab my name and advised my brother to do the same.  My brother never used his account – he had written one tweet and was following 2 people.  Then a couple months later his account was suddenly suspended.  He emailed Twitter support twice to find out why try to get it fixed so when he did want to use it it would be available to him, but so far he’s still waiting and his account is still suspended.  No idea why and no word for months from Twitter about whether or not it’ll ever be reinstated.

I didn’t get suspended, but I did get slapped with something that’ll be very detrimental to getting found online. Twitter has removed me from their search.  You can’t search for me by name and you can’t search for anything I’ve written.  Apparently they’ve done this because I’ve broken a rule in their “Best Practices” by posting duplicate content (tweeting multiple times about my latest YouTube videos with the same links to them each time). They say this conflicts with a positive Twitter experience and as such I needed to be removed from the search with no chance of being reinstated.  You can read more about it here in the twitter help section.

Why is this so bad?  Well, besides the obvious fact that people who know of me will search for my name and not find me, what’s much worse is that people who search for words and topics that I’m tweeting about won’t see my tweets.  See, Twitter is actually turning into one of the biggest search engines on the internet.  So as long as I’m talking about topical stuff, a lot of the time I’ll show up in people’s searches.  Or at least I would have until they removed me from it. Just posting my blog titles in Twitter for example would have got the attention of people who were searching for things like “getting famous online” or “3D videos on YouTube” or “giving away $100″.

I can understand why Twitter needs to put rules in place and have automated systems to deal with potential problems, but what I can’t understand is why they say it can’t be undone.  I honestly had no idea I was breaking any rules by tweeting multiple times about my videos.  I just wanted to get the attention of more people who might have missed my previous Tweets.  Why didn’t Twitter make a warning system? I would have certainly stopped at that point.  And why now that I’ve been removed, can’t I apply to have my searches reinstated?  At least on YouTube if you break copyright they give you warning before they take any drastic action (well, most of the time anyway) and if they do take measures against you, you can apply to have them removed and everything reinstated.

I guess it just goes to show that you have to be careful with Social Media and realize that it your Social Media profiles don’t really belong to you. Even though you can say it’s your account, it’s on their site, and that means they have total and complete control over it, not you.  I guess I’m lucky Twitter didn’t just suspend my account like they did to my brother.  But as someone who’s on Twitter to get noticed, I have to wonder if I shouldn’t close down the account and start again with a new username so I can get myself and my tweets back into the searches.

What do you think? Is it fair for Twitter to have such stringent rules with no chance of appeal when action is taken against you?  Is being removed from their searches a big enough deal to start a new account?