Landing in “Twitter jail”
Twitter has recently seen a massive spike in the number of users complaining about their accounts being locked. It’s bad enough you can wind up in “Twitter jail” if you tweet more than 100 messages an hour or 1,000 messages a day, but now Twitter seems to be locking down accounts for a completely different reason.
Many Twitter users have received emails stating their accounts have been locked. At first, users thought this was a deliberate action, but now it seems it was an automated tool getting a little bit too temperamental.
In light of the recent increase of high-profile Twitter account being hacked and hi-jacked, including Twitter’s own CEO, Anothony Noto, it seems feasible that Twitter would be working towards automated tools to help weed out offending accounts. However, if the tools become too temperamental, as seems to be the case here, many everyday user’s accounts are being locked and this results in a lot of unhappy Tweeters.
Twitter’s on it, but you should take your own steps
Twitter is currently working on the issue and most cases have been resolved, but it does make us wonder, what would happen if you were indefinitely locked out of your Twitter account? For most businesses, critical information is posted to Twitter: interactions, questions, comments, and retweets all help businesses engage with their customer base. If you lose any of this information, including current marketing campaigns, your businesses could lose time and money while you attempt to recover the information, as well as, control of your Twitter account.
In these cases, it is good to know you can back up your tweets. One solution: IFTTT (If This, Then That), the virtual sticky tape that helps apps communicate with one another. IFTTT offers a recipe (algorithm) that sends all your tweets to Evernote. With this, you can keep a running account of your tweets, should you ever need them again. There are several solutions available to back up your tweets, but this is a good starting point because you can set the recipe and just forget about it; everything is done automatically.
Losing control of your Twitter account, even for a day, can have an impact on your business. Thankfully, Twitter seems to have the problem under control. However, it’s still a good idea to back those tweets up, just in case. Better safe than sorry.
