So I woke up yesterday morning, responded to a few emails and then opened up my Seesmic desktop application that I use for my Twitter account management. I quickly noticed that something didn’t look right. I hadn’t gotten a Reply or a Direct Message (DM) in over 12 hours so I opened my Twitter Profile in a browser directly and I was stunned at what I saw:
“Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity.”
My Twitter account had been suspended? Banned for “strange activity”? How could that have happened? I was stunned and totally indignant. How could they ban ME? Don’t they know who I am? (kidding)
What do I do now?
I considered myself a model Twitterer and was certainly not spamming with obnoxious marketing and advertising. My Twitter dialogue was constructive, I had a good balance of personal updates (a few) and links out to valuable content, I wasn’t posting duplicate content or blasting out automated marketing messages, and my Twitter following to follower ratio was balanced. I thought I was doing everything right.
I wasn’t auto delivering my Tweets or doing anything that I would consider being aggressive or “spammy.” What I was doing, however, was using one of those Twitter tools, called Hummingbird to help manage my account, a desktop application from a company called Mesabi Labs. I was well aware of the dangers of using an automated tool like this to manage a Twitter account but thought I had a pretty good handle on how to use it effectively without getting in trouble. As it turns out, I was wrong.
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