How to avoid Account Suspension on Twitter. Playing within the rules.

I’ve recently been at the wrong end of a blocked Twitter account and it really wasn’t the best of experiences. Not only did it take three visits to Twitter’s help centre (each visit taking two days for a response) but the consequence of having a blocked account for nearly a week cost me just under a thousand of my hard earned followers. It was a pain as I’m trying actively trying to build my following to attempt entice backers to help publish my latest novel.

Anyway, as a result I decided to undertake a bit of research into what it is that the Twitter bots are objecting to me doing.

My tactic to build followers is simple and consists of following the followers of authors in my genre. With any luck they’ll notice my follow and like what I’m doing enough to follow me back. The technique seems to work and I’m now up to eight thousand followers. All good but the downside being if I’m not careful, Twitter can mistake me for a spammer and as a result block my account. Bad times.

Twitter’s rules, limits and regulations regarding following and unfollowing can at times be a little vague and confusing. Obviously they are there to stop abuse of the platform and are probably vague to prevent reverse engineering by naughty programmers much cleverer than me.

Assuming you aren’t intentionally trying to abuse Twitter you need at least a working knowledge of these Twitter rules to prevent your account being suspended.

From what I’ve read there are three points that one needs to keep in mind – particularly if you use the platform on a daily basis.

It is recommended that you follow less than one hundred people per day. This is particularly key if you have less than two thousand followers.
Once your following rises above this level you should find you are able to follow more people without a problem. However please note that Twitter has a hard limit of one thousand follows in a twenty four hour period. This is where I think I’ve been caught out; If you follow more than a thousand the account will be blocked and additional follows in the same period rejected.
Be aware there is allegedly no limit on unfollowing, but again I would stick to the thousand limits. Again I have been asked to verify the account on a couple of occasions when unfollowing on mass. It is also recommended that you do not unfollow and refollow the same people repeatedly. Twitter considers this as aggressive activity and will result in a ban.

If you stick to the rules your Twitter account shouldn’t face any account suspension issues. I suppose as a caveat remember that Twitter are entitled to change their rules and limits without notice or even publishing the changes. Good luck and I wish I’d known about these limits earlier!

I am still actively seeking pledges for my latest novel, ‘The Atlantis Deception’ which is on the road to being published by the crowdfunding publisher, Unbound. If you like Michael Crichton with a little Clive Cussler on the side, please check out the project at https://unbound.com/books/the-atlantis-deception/ and perhaps consider becoming a patron of the creative arts.