| What You Can Learn from Twitter's Mass Account Suspension |
If you logged into your Twitter account the weekend of July 4th, you may have been shocked to find that your account had been suspended. Word out of the Twitter camp is that there was a "spamcloud” (whatever that means). In response, Twitter suspended many thousands of accounts of innocent users.
It goes without saying that this is very poor policy on Twitter's part, and the kind of thing that could kill the app. If Twitter wants to stay dominant, it needs to keep in mind that eventually a newer app will come along that people will fall in love with, and this kind of policy won't help.
This episode highlights one important principle of Internet marketing, which is this:
Make sure that you have control over the Web properties that you are going to be spending time promoting.
You don't own your Twitter account. Facebook owns your Facebook page. Your LinkedIn account is not yours. If any of those sites decide they don't like what are you doing, they can lock you out.
A simple solution is to point your own custom domain names to your social media pages. For instance, if you have a Facebook Pages page, then you could register a domain name that point to that page. Then, if your Facebook page goes down, you can repoint the domain name elsewhere. If you have promoted a particular domain, rather than the default page name, then you have control. If you've spent all of your time promoting your Facebook page under its default Facebook URL, then you are at Facebook's mercy.
To make sure you understand, here is a hypothetical example:
Facebook URL: http://www. facebook.com/somewords#/pages/MoreWords/83425934948
Custom URL: SomeDomainName.com
As you can see, a custom URL is much easier to remember and can be pointed to a different web site if necessary.
The same concept also applies to Twitter or any other social media site. There is a search engine benefit to Twitter's default page name, which is that if it contains a keyword, it may have a good chance at ranking for that keyword. You can still use a custom domain name.
So be proactive. Don't let your social media sites own you. Concentrate your marketing efforts on promoting domain names that you control. Then maybe you can avoid the next meltdown such as what happened with Twitter this weekend.
Don't pull your hair out trying to manage your Twitter account - do it the easy with with Tweet Later! It automates three important parts of the Twitter process: making posts, following those who follow you, and sending direct messages to new followers. There is a free version with more limited functionality, but the full professional version offers a one week free trial with no credit card needed! Just visit http://www.trytweetlater.com. Check out twitterforbusiness.blogspot.com to learn how to use Twitter to promote your business.
Article Source: UnArchived Articles
|
|
|
|
