Save Yourself from a Twitter Smack-down continued...

Twitter does not want you to have more than one account. It’s right in their rules. Do people have more than one account? Sure, many do. And there are so many accounts that twitter will probably never find out- unless… You know how search engines crawl through the web looking at the content that’s there. If Google finds identical content in two different places Google will disregard that content as being unoriginal. So if you have two blogs, and many people do, and you post the exact same article on both, Google will not rank either of them. Well twitter uses that same search technology to look at tweets coming out of accounts. If twitter believes that two accounts are sending out the identical series of tweets- you’re done- suspended- gone. And those accounts will be wiped out and not reinstated.

I can’t tell you the specifics of their spam policy because I’m not going to push the envelope to test them. I do know that you cannot just automatically send out tweets constantly or you will be shut down. (If any of you have had that happen, please let me know.) 300 tweets a day from an account does not get it shut down, but would 500?

Could you send out one tweet over and over? Sure, but frequency is the key. They are secretive about where they draw the line. If they were open about their parameters many would push their accounts right to the limit, so their secrecy is a tool they use to make all of us act more conservatively. Think about it. If you thought you could drive traffic to your site by sending out 1,000 tweets a day on your twitter account, wouldn’t you send out that 1,000? There are 86,400 seconds in a day and I’ll bet that if twitter let you send out a tweet every second you’d have 86,400 going out every single day. I would. That would make twitter a very messy place, as if it’s not messy now.

I don’t know exactly what percentage of difference you need from one twitter account to another but it appears to be a small percentage of difference to avoid being flagged by twitter. I’d guess about 10%. In other words if you have two accounts up and you load them to automatically send out tweets having every tenth tweet be unique to that account and the other nine being identical in both accounts will probably keep you safe.

No question that twitter is a valuable tool for marketing. It takes an investment of time to build up a young account to the numbers needed to drive traffic effectively. It’s well worth it. But be careful. That morning, I lost 30,000 followers. Whack.