Are Google, Twitter and Facebook Too Big to Care About Their Users??

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you'll know that I have had issues with the customer service (or lack of it) provided by Google and Twitter.  A year ago, I wrote about the enigma that is Google and the major problems that a friend of mine had inadvertently got himself into by trying to advertise an internet marketing course.

More recently, I've written about the suspension of my account from Twitter and the infuriating business of trying to abide by rules that are vague to say the least, and not being able to contact Twitter for clarification.  I said, at that time, that I was going to write to Twitter by snail mail and some people said they'd be interested to hear what happened.

What happened was both expected and unexpected.  The expected part was that I didn't receive a reply to my letter.  The unexpected was that, just about the time they would have received my letter, my account was suspended again.  Coincidence?  Who knows.  After the usual palaver of appealing, I got it back again.

Shortly before that, a friend of mine, who had never used Twitter before, had opened an account.  Having heard my story of suspension for so-called aggressive following, he was surprised to receive an email from Twitter,  saying "Take 2 minutes to make Twitter work better for you.  We have one suggestion: follow more people.  Yes, more."  There was no indication of how many more Twitter wanted him to follow but  he chose to confine his following to a very modest 60 or so every other day.  (You will remember that Twitter rules say "if you don’t follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren’t using automated methods of following users, you should be fine.")

After a bit, and remembering the Twitter email, he decided to increase it to 60 every day - still well under the stipulated 'hundreds'.  So he was somewhat annoyed when his account was suspended.  He sent an appeal . . . and heard nothing.  He waited a week, then sent another appeal.  Eventually he got a reply, about two weeks after the original suspension, which said  "Twitter has automated systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk.  Unfortunately, it looks like your account got caught up in one of these spam groups by mistake."  There was an apology for 'the inconvenience' but not for the delay in dealing with it, and the account was restored.

The question remains - why was this innocent little account with its six hundred or so followers and its one or two tweets a day mistaken for a spam account? And why did Twitter take so long to sort it out?  Is this one more aspect of its administration that Twitter needs to improve?  Probably . . . but I suspect the likelihood of it happening is miniscule.

You'll have noticed that I mention Facebook, too, in the heading of this post.  Recently I published a book - Say Goodbye to Sleepless Nights - on Kindle and ran a special promotion on it for five days.  I decided to run an ad on Facebook for just those five days.  I set up the ad and received an email that it had been approved.  It ran for two days.  Then I received an email that it had not been approved.  The reason, it seemed, was that there was more than the permitted 20 per cent of text on the illustration.  Since the illustration was of the book cover, with title and my name, I thought this was absurd and was pleased to see that there was a link to a page where one could appeal.  I clicked the link . . . and was brought to a blank page.  I went to the Facebook help section but could find no way of contacting Facebook to make my appeal.

So that was that, until I received my invoice for the two days.  And then I found that there was an email link for problems regarding payment.  So I used that to contact the helpdesk.  I received a charming email from a very pleasant-seeming lass who understood my appeal and said that she had now approved my ad but that it would remain inactive until I reactivated it.  If I wanted to run a different ad with the same image in the future, she said, I could contact her if there was any trouble.

As you can imagine, at this point I was thinking very kindly of Facebook.  Obviously the link to the blank page was just a gremlin in the works.  Everything seemed to have worked out well.  Until I received a second invoice for another two days.  I went to my Facebook ad page and found that  despite the assurance that the ad  would remain inactive until I chose to change it, it had been activated.  I immediately deleted it, so as to avoid this happening again . . . and wrote to the charming lass to complain.  What really annoys me is that the ad was for a special promotion which was not running in those last two days.  So it was money wasted and probably annoyed some people who clicked it and found that, while it led them to the book, it was now full price.

Anyway, I have learned a further lesson . . . that when a Facebook campaign is over, it needs to be deleted, not just made inactive.  That way, these sort of accidents can't occur.

Is Twitter out of touch with its users?

Like many people on Twitter, I have more than one account in order to keep my various interests separate.  I wrote on here, not long ago, about having one account suspended and being unable to determine exactly what the rules of Twitter are.

Just before Christmas, I discovered, when I tried to access it, that another account had been suspended.  This time it wasn't just a question of ticking boxes to say that I'd be good.  I had to make contact with the 'support' desk.  It seemed a good opportunity to ask questions.

I received a form email which said "If your account was suspended for aggressive following behavior, you should have received an email notification to the address associated with your Twitter account"  (which I hadn't) and it continued "You'll need to confirm that you've removed all prohibited following automation from your account, and will stop any manual aggressive following behavior."

I replied, saying that, as far as I was aware, I had remained within the rules of Twitter.  I pointed out that the Twitter guideline of  "if you don’t follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren’t using automated methods of following users, you should be fine" was very vague.   And I noted that, since the beginning of December I had unfollowed an average of 31 people a day and followed an average of just under 60 a day - not hundreds.  Finally I asked for some concrete advice on  the numbers that are acceptable.

The email I received in reply to this was, again, a form letter telling me that as I'd agreed not to follow aggressively in future, my account would be reinstated.  There was no reference to my request for advice or, indeed, to anything that I'd said in the letter.  I was left wondering whether anyone had read it.

I tried again to contact Twitter and get an answer but all I got was yet another form letter telling me that this particular correspondence had been closed.  And it was then that I realised how well-nigh impossible it is to contact Twitter.  Many of the links in the 'contact us' section lead only to pages with generalised answers in particular areas.  There are very few questions that one can actually ask Twitter direct . . . and "how many people is it OK to follow at any one time?" is not among them.

I was annoyed . . . but at least I'd got my account back.  But when I actually accessed that account again, I was furious.  Because I realised that the reason I'd been suspended was because I'd been hacked.  Only direct messages sent after the account had been reinstated were accessible but, among these, there were well over 200 saying 'thank you for following'.  Now, normally, I can expect perhaps ten or twenty per cent of those I follow to send me a direct message.  So how many must have been followed in this account's name for there to be over 200 - not counting, of course, those that came in before the account was suspended.

So I had been suspended because someone had hacked into my account.  But why did Twitter not query the fact that someone who'd been going along quietly for the best part of a year following 150 or 200 every two or three days, suddenly seemed to have followed perhaps 2000 on one day?  Did it occur to no one that it was out of character?  Or is everything that happens at Twitter automated?  The 'support' emails that I received certainly seem to suggest it.

And, of course, this leads me to wonder why everything is automated and why there is so little genuine support.  Could it be because Twitter is free?  Well, personally, I'd be happy to pay a small amount each year (and with the number of people on Twitter, it wouldn't have to be more than a few dollars) if they'd supply a decent support service.  I'm really angry that I can't email someone to say "I didn't transgress the rules . . . you punished me because my account was hacked".

I'm thinking of writing a letter to Twitter by snail mail  . . . there is an address provided.  Meanwhile I have changed all my passwords and am keeping my fingers crossed that this doesn't happen again.

Does Anyone Here Understand the Rules of Twitter?

My Twitter account was just suspended.  Fortunately it's not a big hoo-ha to get it back . . . you just have to tick some boxes saying you'll be a good girl (or boy) in future.  But it's the reason I was suspended that puzzles me.

The page . . . and yes, it is a 'one size fits all' page . . . said I had been suspended because I'd been following aggressively and there had been a large number of reports of my spamming.

Now first of all, I'd like to say I abhore spam.  However, it seems that Twitter's definition of spam is very different from what most of us might understand by that term.  According to Twitter, you are spamming:

• If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
• If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
• If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;

all of which sounds, to me, identical to their definition of 'aggressive following'.  But spamming covers other actions as well - in fact, there's a long list - and one of these is:

• If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;

which is also troubling because I do post links in almost all my posts - they're to articles and news items that I think may be interesting or helpful and which, I believe, my followers are following me in order to see.  I hope that what Twitter means is just links without some text saying what it is . . . but it's not clear.

As far as the 'aggressive following is concerned',  my following habits have remained exactly the same for at least the past six or eight months and I've never been suspended before.  I always follow roughly the same number of people each time . . . and only every other day, never ever two days running.  So why now?

And what also puzzles me is who these large number of people who reported me are.  Because a very large proportion of those who I follow, follow me back - usually around 70 to 80 per cent.  And, although I guess quite a number will automatically follow back anyone who follows them, I'd like to think that a lot of those who follow me do so because I post links to interesting articles and news items.

So, yes, I'm quite offended to have had my account suspended for aggressive following and spamming.  Of course, one of the problems is that no one outside Twitter actually knows what aggressive following consists of.  The guidelines say  "if you don’t follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren’t using automated methods of following users, you should be fine."  (Notice it says 'should' . . . not 'will be'.)  But how many hundreds is 'hundreds'?

One Twitter expert I know used to teach that you could follow up to three hundred a day for three days in a row.  And some bigwig at Twitter had assured him personally that it was OK to do this.  But I know someone who was suspended for following 200 two days in a row and then, once she was reinstated, two days later for following ten!

I find it difficult to understand what Twitter hopes to gain by being so vague.  It would, after all, be quite easy to say "You may not follow more than 200 people once every two days" or something of the sort.  Then we'd all know where we stood.  But, sadly, this seems to be the way things go online these days (if you've read the posts I wrote in January about Google adwords, you'll know what I'm referring to).  And I wonder whether ultimately it's just about power . . . knowing that they have a hold over so many people who are anxiously pussy-footing around, trying not to break rules that haven't been fully explained.  Sadly, we'll never know.