A New Zealand company is reporting that its Twitter account has been suspended due to “Updates consisting mainly of links, and not personal updates" -- which, if true, means that any other business that posts a lot of links could suffer the same fate.
"I suspect the Reuters account http://twitter.com/reuters will be suspended very soon as clearly 99% of their posts are links back to their site," noted the social media marketing company, Business Blogs, tongue-in-cheek, in describing the situation. "Of course its not just Reuters – all profiles controlled by news agencies should be suspended as well."
The company found that its account had been suspended on July 15. "The Twitter profile took our staff over 6 months to build up to a 5,000 follower count by updating the profile with content at least 3 times per day," the company wrote . "There was no selling, no spam and no abuse."
What the company did do -- like many other companies -- was to use a third-party social media company, CampaignHub , to automate the posting of items to sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, as well as to hold contests and promotions. And in response to Twitter spammers that make a business out of promising to build up one's Twitter following, the company has been cracking down on automated postings.
"Automated or mass-created affiliate advertising is not permitted on Twitter," Twitter writes . "Your tweets may be sponsored by a third-party if you manually post or approve each sponsored tweet before it is posted. These updates may not be automated or scheduled in advance."
It is possible that Business Blogs violated some aspect of these rules. However, if that's the case, and Twitter is cracking down in general, many more businesses could find themselves Tweetless.
