Getting Slapped by Twitter

Twitter slapped me. Seems that over the past few weeks I have heard more and more people express that they had been slapped by Twitter. Since beginning to tap into the power of Twitter and other Web 2.0 sites, I have seen numerous variations of getting slapped. Before going any further I guess I should explain that getting slapped by any of the social media sites is a nice way of explaining that you have stepped outside of the rules and paid a price for doing so.

While many of you may have heard of the “Google Slap” where Google inflicts some sort of punishment for not following their guidelines, most of the other slaps that I have heard of are not that extreme.

While I am not going to recap the rules and regulations for using all of the various Web 2.0 sites, I would highly recommend that you take a brief moment to briefly familiarize yourself with the rules of the sites that you most frequent. The reason for this is very simple, because if you don’t in extreme cases you may find that your account has been completely removed. Ouch!!

In the case of Twitter it is not nearly that extreme, at least not from what I have seen. The one difference is with many of the spammer accounts that where making use of Twitter as a means of constantly streaming promotional content. Again, while I did not personally experience a lot of spam there were a number of my friends that had run into this problem. The good news is that Twitter has removed a lot of accounts that were identified as spammers.

In the case of Twitter, you may be having fun posting your tweets, following more people and just in general not thinking about the numbers that are totaling in your account. As it has been explained to me once you start following 2000 people, Twitter examines your ratio of following to followers and if you fall outside of their parameters, then they s don’t allow you to follow anyone else, until you get your figures in order. In terms of getting slapped by any of the Web 2.0 sites this is a relatively minor inconvenience, but something you will want to fix. The good news is that your account is still intact and you can correct the problem.

While you can go to your listing of followers and go page by page to discover who you are following verses those who are following you, this can be a very time consuming a tedious process. Not being the most patient of people I wanted to find a better way of managing my Twitter account. While a quick Google search will turn up more Twitter tools than you can imagine, I will list a few of the tools that I am using and have found to be very helpful. Now with that said if you have found a tool that has helped you in managing your Twitter account I would love to hear about it. Personally, I am all about working smarter and not harder.

Below you will find some of the tools that I am using to make my Web 2.0 life a little easier to manage, at least with Twitter:

Friend or Follow (http://www.friendorfollow.com) – Friend or Follow easily identifies who are you following that’s not following you back. And on the other side of the coin they show who’s following you that you’re not following back.

Tweet Later (http://www.tweetlater.com/) – Schedule tweets and keep your Twitter stream ticking over with new tweets even when you’re not in front of your computer. Publish tweets when your international followers are online and you’re asleep….much more.

Tweet Deck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) – TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. The default columns can contain All Tweets from your timeline, @replies directed to you and direct messages. The GROUP, SEARCH and REPLIES buttons then allow the user to make up additional columns populated from the live tweet information.

Twollo (http://www.twollo.com/) – Never miss out on a conversation. No longer hear only one side of the story. Tell us what you like, and we do the hard work of finding the conversations that you should be involved in.

Twitter for WordPress (http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/twitter/) – Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

Twitoria (http://www.twitoria.com) – Twitoria tries to reduce Twitter’s clutter by revealing friends you are following that haven’t posted an update in a while. It can, for example, easily track down those pesky friend spammers that post no content, or people that have abandoned Twitter for another status updating service.

If you happen to be one of those networkers that are approaching the 2000 mark of those that you are following, I would highly recommend taking a look at the number of followers verses the number that you are following. If in doubt, you may want to take some preventative measures to keep from running into trouble.

From what I understand you can also be slapped if your account is growing too fast, but I don’t know of any details regarding this slap. I have one person explain to me that they were adding too many people to their account in a given period of time and ran into some problems. Again, I don’t know for sure if this is a problem, but something you may want to keep in mind if you are one of those people capable of growing your account by hundreds or thousands over night.

Tagged as: marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, social media, twitter, web 2.0