Many people become frustrated when they hit the 2,000 following barrier in Twitter. It's a limit imposed by Twitter that few people know about when they start but most will run into. In short, it's an anti-spam device by Twitter. You can follow up to 1,000 people in a day, until you've followed 2,000 people. After 2,000, you can only follow 10% more people than are already following you.

A Case Study

Let's take the example of the campaign shown in the graph. Following 1,000 people a day is a recipe for a quick suspension. Twitter closely monitors brand new accounts for churning activity. You're much better off to follow about 300 people/day for the start of your campaign. So you sign up for the free version of our PMS Social Suite and enter a brand new account with a snazy new background, a good profile image, and a few well chosen tweets. Since the list we're using is so powerful, you're getting a follow back ratio of about 60%. In a mere 7 days you've followed 2,000 people and have 1,200 followers. That's very cool, so you upgrade to the paid version and put the campaign completely on autopilot.

What Happened?

Hey, who are these fly by night guys from Promote My Site? The next day the software didn't follow any more than the 2,000 you had followed the day before! Actually, that's not what happened at all. You've hit the 2,000 barrier with an out of balance account. With only 1,200 followers, you can't add anyone because of the 10% limit. The software will also only cull a maximum of 5% of the people you're following, which means at most you'll cull 100 people that aren't following you back. So if you cull 100 people, the software can only add back 100 people and perhaps only 60 of those will follow you back. So the going is going to be very slow for the next few weeks as you're able to gradually cull more people and follow more people each day.

The good news is that the software is relentless and accurate. It doesn't forget to perform your actions each day, although you might. Gradually, the account will come back into balance and you'll be able to follow more people. So the long flat area in the following line in the graph? The account is stuck at the 2K barrier until the followers are brought back into balance, and then the graph slopes sharply upwards because as you get past 2,000 you're able to increase the number of people that you follow each day.

By the end of 60 days you're at 16,000 followers! You had a tough few weeks as you slogged it out through the 2K barrier, but slow and steady wins the race. Now you're seeing real results.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Just like the instructions on the shampoo bottle, this is a good time to start over with a new account. When you're in the 15K range you'll be at the top of many directory listings for any niches you want to market to. Make sure you've signed up for directories such as Twellow. Guess how these are sorted? Yep, by follower count. The number of followers you have is social validation. By being near the top of the list you'll start to pick up followers in your niche because you're there. If you had tried to build a "quality" account by hand from scratch you'd be #2043 on the list and be seen as a mere peon. Now you're a player. If you've been tweeting on your topic you'll be rolling.

Now go ahead and create a new Twitter account and enter that information into the PMS Dashboard. Just click Edit, change the Twitter username and password, and click Update. You can switch your Twitter account as much as you desire -- whatever account is active when the process runs it what will get run. It's far more powerful to have 5 accounts with 15K followers than 1 account with 75K followers. Losing an account to a suspension won't hurt you very much, and you can have your accounts retweet the news from your main account.

The Benefits of Paid Vs Free

Most people hit the 2K barrier while using a free account. If they aren't culling their own non-mutuals, the system will appear to have stopped working. It hasn't stopped, it just can't do anything because once you've hit your limit of following 2,000 people you have to remove some of the people you're following in order to follow more. Don't fall to the temptation to mass unfollow the 1,000 people that aren't following you back in one shot. The 2K barrier is also the time that Twitter seems to pay attention to accounts to see if they're going to start churning. It's far safer to remove 50-100 people/day until you get over the hump. The fastest way over the hump is to have been removing those people along the way as you grew so that you arrive at the 2K barrier with a fairly balanced account. If you're using the paid service you won't run into that problem. You'll just see a flattening of the graph for about 10 days and then you'll be back to the steady growth you had become accustomed to. Go ahead and Sign up!

A number of people have noticed that the Lt_Draper Twitter account is now sporting the Who Goes There Owl. In other words, it was suspended by Twitter for "breaking the rules." We'll point out that we've never done anything that is against Twitter's Terms of Service, but according to their terms, "We reserve the right, in accordance with any applicable laws, to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time." They can terminate your account any time they please -- you haven't paid them any money and your account exists solely at their whim. Do a Google search for "Twitter Account Suspended" and you'll see a lot of people singing the Twitter Owl Blues.

Should I Be Worried That Don's Account Was Suspended?

At first glance, that might be cause for concern. If a popular account like the lt_draper account can get suspended, what does that mean for you?

In reality, Don gave his account so that others could live. We've always counseled our customers that if they're going to live on the dangerous side and aggressively market on Twitter they need to cover their bets by having several accounts. Lt_Draper was just one of many accounts we run here and we push the envelope very hard to find out what the limits are. With this particular account, we violated just about every rule we outlined in our previous post Stupid Twitter Tricks to Get Your Account Suspended.

• Certain Topics Tend to Draw Attention - This account was promoting articles about how to use automation on Twitter.
• Getting Blocked - This account was connected to an account on a forum where we took a rather unpopular stand with the rainbows, unicorns, and Skittles set. Some people were vocal about their intent to block and report as spam accounts that were taking the position that automation can be a useful marketing tool.
• Churning Follow and Unfollow - We were pretty much testing the upper limits on what we could get away with on this account.
• Hitting the Top 1,000 - Twitter seems to take a close look at accounts that hit around 20,000 followers, which is enough to put you into the top 1,000. Lt_Draper had just broken 28,000 followers.

So it's not shocking that the account got suspended. It didn't impact our business at all because we've been following our own advice. We've burned accounts before and we expect to burn them again. We're playing at the edge so you don't have to.

What You Should Take Away

There are some critical lessons you can learn:

• Have more than 1 Account - Yes, we sound like a broken record, but you really shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. Twitter can terminate your account for any reason or no reason at all. And they do.
• Stay Under the Radar - When you get an account to around 15K followers it's a good time to start a new account. It's far more powerful to have 5 accounts with 15K followers than a single account with 75K followers.
• Stay Quiet - If you tweet unpopular things or take unpopular positions there will be spiteful people that will block you. Twitter looks at blocking activity as a vote against your account. So if it's a business account, stay quiet. Avoid the urge to tweet things like "David Beckham kicks like a girl."
• Don't use more than 1 Service at Time - We've seen some accounts get suspended and when we look at the google cache of their profile page it becomes evident that they were using several "free" services to enhance their account. The problem with that approach is that you don't know which service got you banned. If you want to try several services, then build several accounts and experiment. But mixing services is just pushing the limits.
• Let The Software Work - We've pushed the limits with several accounts to find out where they are. We've set our software up to stay within about 50% of those limits. Don't turn around and follow more people on your own or mass unfollow while the software is running on your account. You're busting carefully determined limits and asking for trouble.
• Be Patient - It's easy to get frustrated, especially when you're running up against the 2,000 Follower Barrier. The software will get you through that hump, let it work. If you really can't wait the week to ten days it will take to get past the hump, then run 10 accounts up to 2,000. That's by far the quickest route to being able to contact 20,000 people with your tweets.

This is part of what you pay for with our service - our willingness to create dozens of accounts and, through trial and error, discover what works, what doesn't work, and what really doesn't work. We also recognize that twitter has changing standards for what is allowable, so we'll always have a pipeline of twitter accounts at different levels (pre 2K, etc) that we manipulate and test on so that you can just use our service and concentrate on your marketing messages.

It's not us!  Twitter is currently unable to process follow and unfollow requests. Or perhaps they'll show up after a while. As of this afternoon, if you click follow on someone's profile it will say you're following them, until you click refresh in which case it will say you're not following them.

So yeah, our software hasn't added any users for you today. At least it was a computer that found that out instead of you spending your time on it.

We'll be back when they're back.

I don't know how many times I've said this, but I'll say it again. Don't use Twitter automation on an account that you can't afford to lose. If it's an account that you're personally invested in you shouldn't play with it. Don't bet something you can't afford to lose.

With that said, getting suspended on Twitter is not as nearly as common as some people would have you believe. Out of a sample of 650K Twitter accounts we've researched, about 2,700 of them were suspended. That's 0.4% -- pretty good odds. Out of the hundreds of accounts we've run through our system, we've seen about 1% of them get suspended. That's double the average, but you'd expect a higher rate among people willing to push the envelope. Whenever we see an account get banned, we look at the profile in the google cache and see what they were doing. They were all pushing the envelope. We've started to detect some trends of the type of activity that will get you suspended:

• Young Accounts Get Closer Scrutiny - Accounts that are a few days old and immediately zoom to follow 1,000/day will flag themselves for a suspension. An account without any updates or the default icon also draws attention. If you're starting with a fresh account, it's important that a high percentage of the first people that you follow follow you back. It's also important that you grow slowly until you get over the 2,000 follower hump. Then you can gain speed.
• Certain Topics Tend to Draw Attention - MLM, Email Marketing, Poker, Porn, etc combined with a young and aggressive profile will get the owl hovering.
• Automated Tweets - While it may seem like a cool trick to hook up a popular blog's (not your own) rss feed to TweetLater so that you've got automated tweets, Twitter seems to detect that you're only tweeting links, and duplicate ones at that. Likewise automatically tweeting the links from another social network such as all your Diggs or Stumbles and no other content will get their attention.
• Too Many @Replies or DMs - If you blast a marketing message via @reply or direct messages you'll attract attention. Yes, you can send up to 1,000 messages a day. Just don't make it a mass mailing.
• Getting Blocked - This is perhaps the number one indicator to Twitter of an abusive account. If people are blocking you and enough people do it they will take a look at you.
• Churning Follow and Unfollow - Don't try the cheap shot of following someone and then unfollowing them an hour later. That strategy used to work -- enough people were using services that automatically followed people back and those had enough of a lag that you could fool them into a one-way follow. But it's pretty clear that Twitter is looking for that behavior. To be safe, don't unfollow someone for at least 72 hours after you've followed them. And don't unfollow more than 5% of your total in any one day.

If you're using the PMS Social Suite you won't run into problems of following too quickly or churning. We enforce carefully formulated ratios on our automated activity to stay within the limits. If one of our users gets blocked by someone, no other of our users will try to follow them. All of the accounts in the system get the benefit of data gained from all the other accounts. Keep tracking of all that and making all those calculations by hand is a tall order, so automation is key.

What you do on your own time is up to you. But again, you're pushing the envelope by using automation. If you're a customer you've seen the giant gains you can get. But it's not risk free. So don't risk something you can't afford to lose. And don't push it even further by engaging in those other behaviors unless you're ok with playing the game of constantly getting your accounts suspended.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that your Twittering needs to be genuine. Automation is great for making the first contact, but that's not a license to spam. You should be using this strategy to make contact with more people. You still need to move them into other touch points in your sales system such as your blog, newsletters, product offers, etc. That doesn't mean build up a huge list of followers and then start tweeting only affiliate links at them. You've got to build up credibility. Throw in some useful information and links to other sources. You'll find that people are a lot more likely to click on the links you need them to.

We haven't had too many complaints about our service, but the most frequent complaint we get seems to be "Your software works too well!"

A lot of people have been surprised at how many followers they pick up, even with the free trial. The average seems to be about 1,000 new followers over the course of a week. For a few people, this has been enough to decide they don't want any more.

There's an easy solution to this: just go to your Dashboard, click Edit, then click Delete. The next day you'll get an automated message reminding you that you need to enter data if you want the service to work, and then you'll be done. Any record we have of your Twitter information will be gone and you won't end up in the next processing batch.

You Might Not Be Thinking About This Right

We've said several times that you shouldn't use this service for your primary, personal account. Aside from the danger that you could get banned (a small risk, but it can happen and you've been warned), it also means that your personal timeline will see a huge influx of followers. If you don't want to see that, then just create a separate business account and run that through the system. Don't mix business and pleasure.

It also comes down to diversifying your social portfolio. Do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket? If you're targeting five different niches, then you should have five different Twitter accounts -- at least!

Twitter automation is really hot right now. The strategy is working quite well. Will it work forever? Probably not. The only thing constant in Internet Marketing is change. You're not paying any money to Twitter, which means they can do pretty much whatever they want and you don't have recourse. Let's say things change dramatically in six months. If you've been following a particular strategy on a single account and that account becomes worthless, you've lost everything. But if you've got several accounts with different strategies, it's like riding out a downturn in the market with a diversified portfolio. It just doesn't make sense, from a business perspective, to put all your bets on a single account.

How to Keep Track of it All

There are lots of ways to deal with a flood of data in your twitter stream. If you're using the Twitter html interface, you're in a horse and buggy while being passed in the autobahn. It's quaint, but ultimately dangerous.

Our personal preference for a client is Tweetdeck. There are others, that's just the first one we came across that really worked well. If you've got a huge number of people you're following but are only interested in a few key areas, just create a real time search on those keywords. Tweetdeck will display tweets in a separate column that match that search. Now you're right on top of things in real time. You can have a huge net and personal interaction with the key prospects you're looking for.

Let's say there is a small group of people that you really want to follow. You can create a group and display just tweets from that group in a column.

Your RSS reader is also a great way to keep track of tweets in near real time. Look at a Twitter profile page. Down at the bottom of the right sidebar you'll see an rss feed for that user, such as Lt_Draper's RSS feed. You can load that into your rss reader and you'll see the tweets from that user arrive.

Or perhaps you'd like to follow a group of people with RSS. Just create a Yahoo Pipe like Don and Oliver's RSS Feeds. That pipe shows how simple it is to create a mashup of multiple RSS feeds. Click "Edit Source" and you can see how easy it was to build.

You Can Still Be Personal and Popular

There seems to be the misconception among many Internet Marketers that you have to make a choice between having a lot of followers and having quality followers. There's a group of people that think hand picked, delicately crafted follower lists have higher quality than huge lists gained through automation.

Anybody would agree that specifically targeted leads are better than shotgun leads in their eventual quality. But there doesn't have to be a choice between the strategies. Why can't you use automation to build up a large following while you're using manual methods to specifically target people? Automating just means that you have more time for higher value activities. I'll take a list of 30,000 followers, about 1,000 of which were carefully targeted, over a list of 1,000 carefully targeted followers any day.

The benefit to that approach is social proof. If you've got a larger following, the people you follow will see you as more credible than the guy with 60 followers. If you're concerned that people will be put off by your huge following, then run an account that is only handcrafted leads and a few others that are automated.

Find out for yourself. Experiment, measure, and repeat until you find what works. Just don't let the preconceptions you've formed without experience or data color what your'e seeing.

Oh yeah, there's a free trial available: PMS Social Suite. You didn't really expect me to forget to plug what we're selling?

Are you wasting your days whale watching? No, I don't mean spending time on vacation. I mean that special brand of fun you can only have when Twitter is acting completely out of sorts like it has all afternoon today. Half the time a page load times out. A few times they've even put up the "Twitter is over capacity message" but haven't even served up a fail whale.

We're Used to It

As long time Twitter users we're used to it. Is there any other web business where users would put up with such a high rate of failure? Slow response times and sporadic failures are a weekly occurence with Twitter. When Google went down for an hour it made huge news, but people shrug off Twitter going down like a piece of moldy bread. The beauty of it, from Twitter's standpoint, is that when they're having trouble, their user's can't even tweet about it! And when they come back people make a collective sigh of relief and go right back to Twittering.

It's a Problem if You're in Business

The problem with whale watching is that if you're depending upon Twitter to promote your business these outages cost you time. If you're following a manual methodology for adding followers you're going to eat up a lot of time. If you're trying to add twitter followers, the key is to keep up a steady amount of activity, every day.

Let's say you've become completely motivated and want to add a lot of Twitter Followers so you can have an effective marketing impact. You decide that every day you're going to spend a few hours following people on Twitter. Unfortunately, when the Fail Whale surfaces it's easy just to quit that activity and move on to something else. The chances are you'll forget to come back to your Twitter Following task. The next day you do a little less, and within a few weeks you've completely stopped. In another month you decide "Gee, I really ought to get back to that."

The problem with your manual method is that your competitors might not be doing it. Instead of spending an hour a today for a month following people on Twitter, they might have spent $39.95 for a month of the PMS Social Suite and had the autopilot run for several hours a day against an advanced database of people targeted within their niche and likely to follow them back. Perhaps you're proud of your 2,500 followers. They're adding that many followers every week.

What you're really saying by insisting upon spending an hour a day on something you could automate is that your time is only worth $1.33/hour. If that is all your time is truly worth, then perhaps this internet marketing thing isn't your cup of tea...

When the fail whale beaches itself a server based automation system will slog through. If you've installed software on your own machine to do the same thing, your environment slows down with Twitter. A server based solution that you can just set on autopilot and forget about it makes the most sense.

I'm Afraid My Account Will Get Banned

That's a reasonable fear. Which is why you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket. You shouldn't have a single account, you should have a stable of accounts, targeted at the various niches you're going after. If you've invested a lot of time and money building a single account, don't automate it. Create another account and use the automation to build it's followers. When you tweet, use the new account to retweet what you just said.

We have not had a customer get an account banned as a result of using our software. But obviously we can't guarantee that it won't happen. Twitter doesn't seem to mind the kinds of things our software does. Our customers have added 330,142 followers in that last two weeks. That's a lot of activity. Twitter has every motive to have as much activity among their user base as possible. They need to overcome the Oprah drop off effect (A lot of people signed up after Oprah talked about Twitter, and a month later their accounts went dormant). But that could change and Twitter could go to war against the power users much like Digg did. So don't put your eggs all in one basket. Get a lot of eggs, and a lot of baskets.

The pros in this business are all using automation. If you're shying away from automation because you're afraid of losing your account with 500 hard earned followers, you're getting your lunch eaten by the competition and you don't even know about it. They're getting more clicks than you have followers. You can't compete with that without automation.

Go ahead and sign up for a free account. Just register and click on the PMS Social Suite link. You know you want to.

How would you like to add several hundred twitter followers every day, forever? Without adding any additional work to your day? Without installing any software? Just put it on autopilot and walk away?

If that's an interesting proposition, you should read through this entire article.

New Twitter Limits

A while back, Twitter published some limits on following people on Twitter. The key numbers from this are:

• 1,000 per day - That's the limit for the number of people anyone can follow in a day. It doesn't matter if you're Ashton or just Joe Marketer, 1,000 is the limit. That applies to the services that follow people back for you as well.
• 2,000 people to start - You can follow up to 1,000 people per day until you hit 2,000 people. Twitter doesn't publish the next number, but we can verify that it's 10%. You can follow 10% more people than are following you after you've followed 2,000 people.

A Different Approach to Fighting Spammers

While Twitter does indeed go after spammers, they aren't as heavy handed as Digg. They don't seem to ban on a whim. Instead, they let the natural limits of the system determine what people can do. This is more effective than Digg's strategy, which seems to have been to make their system as unusable as possible for marketers. Twitter seems to realize that marketers are a key component of their ecosystem and have helped them grow.

Internet Marketers are like the helpful bacteria in your digestive system. You'd think they'd be bad for you, but if you eradicate them you'll end up sick. Social networks that take a heavy handed approach towards discouraging marketers are doing the same thing.

If you're a long time Promote My Suite Social Suite User, you'll notice some big changes that just went into effect. For one thing, we've dropped all the Digg support. They just didn't seem to be interested, and it wasn't worth fighting the constant battles to get a share of a declining market. Twitter is clearly outpacing Digg these days, so we thought it made more sense to put our efforts into a platform that was actually friendly to internet marketers.

What do the Limits Mean to You?

The new following limits aren't that big a deal to internet marketers (honest ones, at least). 1,000 people a day is a lot of follows. That's 30,000 people you could follow in a month if you were willing to put the time in. If you could get 80% of them to follow you back you'd be adding 24,000 followers a month. It wouldn't take you very long to be a real player.

The problem is most internet marketers don't work like that. They're chronically short on attention. They'll try something for a couple of days or maybe even a week, and then move on to the next shiny thing that pops up. It takes an overwhelming amount of discipline to pound your keyboard through 1,000 profiles every day, cull out the ones that aren't following you after a few days, and keep that up over the long term.

Put it on Autopilot

That's why the new PMS Social Suite is so hot! You can build your twitter following without any of that drudgery. Instead, you log into the system once, enter your twitter account information, and you're done. Our servers will take care of the rest. You can just wait for the status emails to tell you how you're doing or visit the site periodically and look at some pretty graphs.

And more importantly, you can spend your time interacting with people and doing real marketing instead of trying to make tools work and clicking lots of buttons.

Check it out: PMS Social Suite. There's a free version for registered users too!

We are very pleased to announce that Digg and Promote My Site will be partnering to provide Digg's next generation of power user tools. This intiative represents a change in direction for Digg and will be a significiant benefit to the internet marketing community.

Kevin Rose may have said "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In the past we've taken the postion that power users and marketers tend to harm the Digg community, so we've taken steps to make sure that their efforts are not successful. But given the economic times, it only makes sense to explore as many revenue opportunities as we can find. Beer is expensive and we can't just rely upon a bunch of teenagers to keep clicking those snorg tee ads to keep the lights on around here. It's time to let the professionals get to work and start generating some real revenue."

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but insider sources hinted that it was an all cash deal. Under the agreement, Digg will license Promote My Site's previously discontinued suite of power user digging scripts and integrate them into the site in a new product christened the Digg/PMS Suite. For a monthly subscription fee of $99.95, power users will be able to promote their stories on Digg without interference from system administrators or that pesky "Whoa Cowboy" message. Buries, while they will still appear to register on the site, will be ineffective against users of the Digg/PMS Suite and the users will be notified of who is buring their stories. Digg/PMS Suite users will also receive an allowance of 10 "zaps" a month. These "zaps" can be used to ban members of the Digg mafia that only comment and do not submit any useful content to the site. This feature is expected to greatly improve the user experience for all concerned. Futhermore, any previously banned user will be able to have their account reinstated by purchasing a subscription to the Digg/PMS Suite.

A release date for the enhanced Digg/PMS Suite was not disclosed, but it is expected to be in the vicinity of April 1, 2010. In the meantime, users purchasing a subscription to Promote My Site's PMS Social Suite will be in line for a discount on the Digg product if and when it is released.

The latest meme in the Twittersphere has been a complaint about people that use services such as Tweet Later to send automated thank you notes to new followers on Twitter. SocialToo took it so seriously that they dropped that capability from their service. Chris Brogan, Amber Naslund, and Tim Walker have all written on the subject. In fact, probably hundreds of bloggers have written on the subject. I'm now probably going to provide you with the only article in existence that argues against the commonly held belief that auto-DMs are evil.

Trust Us, We're in Marketing

We use Twitter for business. We've written several articles that question the business viability of Twitter, so rather than being on Twitter for peace, love, rainbows, and unicorns, we're there for marketing while they're still around. The proposition to our followers is straightforward. We tweet useful information (and the occasional funny stuff) in the hopes that people will follow us and periodically click on the links to our blog posts. We write blog posts so that people will be drawn to our blog and hopefully purchase some of our products. Once people get to know us they're likely to spend some money with us. In the end it's just a numbers game. If we can't sell anything then none of those other activities make sense. So there's going to be some commercial content mixed in with our message. Anyone that is approaching Twitter (or blogging) for any other purpose has someone else paying their bills, because if you can't turn a profit it's not sustainable.

The Commercials Pay for the Content

So when you receive an auto-DM after you've followed someone, don't whine about it. It's the commercials that pay for the programming.

The people that rant against auto-DMs have something else in mind. If you dig deeper, you'll find out that they also have a problem with the concept of advertising on Twitter in general. As Tim Walker pointed out in the discussion in the comments section we had on his blog, several blogging purists were against people that were getting into blogging to make money as well. If people find auto-DMs offensive, imagine what the reaction would be to corporately sponsored tweets! Is there really any difference between a corporate tweet advertisement and the auto-DM?

Answering the Arguments

Let's look at some of the arguments that have been made against auto-DMs. I'll admit that these are valid if you're on Twitter for recreation, but if you're on Twitter for business networking then I think it's a different situation. Here are some of the arguments that Chris Brogan made in his article:

• Irks me because it's a robot. So I suppose he's stopped watching television and listening to radio? Those advertisements are automatic as well.
• Annoys me because you ask me to click your junk. That's funny, given this and this from just today. So a DM that is just to the person that initiated a follow is annoying, but pimping links to your blog and ebooks to all of your followers is ok?
• Tempts me to go back and unfollow you on principle That's the marketplace of Twitter. If you don't like what someone has done, or what they tweet, or don't find value, then just don't follow them.
• If you're too busy to be an actual human on a social network, don't join another social network. That argument would only make sense if the people that auto-DM only auto-DM and don't provide any other value. But since he initiated the follow in order to get the auto-DM back, he must have been interested in their profile. So what he's really saying is that he wants the information he gets by following for free, and doesn't have time to be bothered with a "commercial" that makes the content profitable to the provider. Twitter should be about Win-Win.
• Follower count doesn't matter. What matters is who you follow. Probably the biggest lie told by the "Twitter Gurus." Without followers, you're just talking to yourself. There's no point in tweeting if there's no one to listen. If all of his followers left him I suspect he'd stop tweeting because it wouldn't be worth his time.

• Conversations are way better than "new blog post" tweets. I agree, but the "new blog post" tweets pay for the conversations. Sure, you don't want to follow someone that only posts the commercials, but there's nothing wrong with mixing those into the conversations.
• What service are you doing me by direct messaging me sending me your links? Quite a bit, if the DM that is sent has truly useful information in it. I agree, don't just send a link that's already in your profile, but something special is, well, something special. And what's so bad about getting the fairly common DM of "Thanks for following?" Are we all so highly stressed and easily offended that the mere courtesy of thanking someone rankles us?

Now let's take a look at Amber Naslund's arguments:

• If you hit me with a spammy sounding DM right when we get connected, I instantly think your community participation is a sham. Except that you've read through my tweets and have already come to a conclusion about following me. You've said "I'd like some free information please" and are upset about the tip jar on the counter.
• You don't know a thing about me yet, except what you read on my profile. How on earth do you know that what you offer is of value to me in the least? I don't, other than you followed me and that people who follow me tend to be interested in what I have to offer, which is why the auto-DM to followers is a reasonable message channel. Only a small percentage of the people that see a commercial on TV will be interested in the offer either. It's a numbers game. Getting upset about it is demanding labor for free. You want to see the work product of the tweets of the person you're following, but you won't accept anything except a 100% customized message?
• I'm a very social person, and dig meeting new people. Truly. So I'm excited that you're following me. Actually, she's got that backwards. She's receiving the auto-DM because she followed them, not vice versa. The only way you can get these messages is to follow someone.
• If your business proposition is more important than saying hello and getting acquainted, then it's clear to me that you don't feel the same way about people as I do, which means we'll probably have little in common anyway. We already said hello. You read my profile and clicked the follow button. You said "Hi" and I said "Hi" back and handed you a business card. That's completely acceptable behavior at a business networking function like a trade show. If you're at a different kind of party then I am, then just unfollow and walk away. But you came to me and said "Hi", I didn't initiate things, so stop whining when I act in a reasonable manner for the context I'm operating in.
• Like many, many other people, I do business with people I like and trust. But like and trust are not instant affinities. So you like and trust and have a personal relationship with your phone company, your power company, your grocer, and your mortgage processor? I'll bet the last time you filled up your gas tank you did it through a completely robotic interface. You can't build up trust merely through a conversation anyway -- trust depends upon performance. And frankly, I find it really hard to trust someone that claims to be completely altruistic and providing everything for free, when I know they have to be making money through their activity somehow in order to survive. I'd much rather deal with people that are up front about why they're here.

I don't disagree with the points that Tim Walker from Hoovers made. Go read his article and the comments below -- we had a very civil exchange. At Promote My Site, our approach to Twitter comes down to a numbers game. We picked up 6,000 followers on the Lt_Draper account in February. We had an auto-DM set up that thanked people for following and asked them to add our rss feed to their reader. We've had several people tell us that our rss feed is hard to find, so we thought that was reasonable "extra" information to put in the welcoming DM. Evidently a lot of people thought so too, because our feedburner stats more than doubled during the month.

Compare that to trying to manually research every follower (click their profile, click their website link, read their recent tweets and really get to know them). A very cursory approach might take 5 minutes each. That's 500 hours of labor for the month. Oliver and I are workaholics, but there's just no way we're going to be able to handle that. So instead we use an auto-DM. It probably does offend a certain number of people, but I'm guessing they weren't potential clients anyway. If you're so wrapped up in the idea that everything on the internet should be free and you don't want advertising interrupting your flow of information, then you're probably not going to purchase a subscription to our site.

So don't follow. But quit whining.

I'm not saying this has happened to you, but if you spend much time at all promoting your site in social media, eventually you're going to need a new ip address. Maybe the 20-something sysadmin was in a bad mood and was feeling the need for a power trip, or maybe you made a mistake and pushed the envelope just a little too far. But getting banned on most social networks means that they'll ban any further signups from your IP address.

Digg has an Odd Policy

This policy has really never made much sense to me. They've banned your account, so you've lost all the work you put into their site and the prestige you've built up. You'd think they'd just let you have a reset and say "Go forth and sin no more." But many sites, especially Digg, have the strange idea that if they ban your account, you're banned for life. You can never come back.

That's odd in Digg's case, because that's not what their TOS says. In fact, their TOS says nothing about multiple accounts at all. The closest anything on their site comes to saying this is in their FAQ:

To protect the integrity of the system, our policy is one person, one account. This is to help prevent users from artificially inflating Digg counters, which is explicitly against our Terms of Use.

So even the FAQ answer doesn't support their policy. As long as you have only one account, you're completely within the terms of the TOS and even their interpretation in the FAQ. Their claim that once you've been banned you can never come back just isn't supported in the agreement you made when you joined the site.

One also has to wonder how many thousands of people are cut off when one of these social sites demonstrates their lack of understanding of the architecture of the internet and heavy handedly bans an IP address for the router that stands between the internet and an entire Fortune 500 company or a university. If you're going through a firewall, it can appear that there are thousands of machines all with the same IP address.

Getting a New IP Address

Many people think their IP address is 192.168.0.1. Sorry, but that's a subnet reserved for local area networks. If you run "ipconfig /all" from a DOS prompt you'll see a number like that if you're behind a firewall. What you really want to know is the IP address of the device that the outside world sees. You can easily see this by going to http://whatismyip.com/. That's the address that the social networks see from you.

For most people, getting a new IP address consists of unplugging their connection to the internet and plugging it back in. Power cycling your DSL or Cable modem is usually enough to get a new DHCP assigned address. Very few people have real static IP addresses since that requires a special set up on the part of the ISP. What many people do run into is what Road Runner does: the IP address is stored on the cablemodem, so the modem keeps the same IP address between power cycles. There's an easy way around this.

With Road Runner, the cablemodem is storing the MAC address (Media Access Control) of the device connected to it on your side of the firewall. So if you've got the standard setup of PC -> Router -> CableModem, it's the MAC address of the router that the cablemodem is tracking. As long as the same device is connected, you can power cycle the cablemodem all day and the IP address is not going to change. So what you want to do is change the MAC address of the router. With a Linksys router, just go to setup -> MAC Address Clone and change one of the numbers. Click "Save Settings" and then power cycle your cablemodem. When it wakes back up, it will see a different device attached to it and it will require a new IP address on its site. Tada! New IP address for you. It's about a 5 minute operation.

At first glance you'd think changing the MAC Address would be dangerous, but it's not. The MAC address of your router is only being seen by the cablemodem. You don't have to worry about someone else on the internet duplicating your MAC Address because your cablemodem can't see anything but your router anyway. If you're really worried about this then you could always plug a different PC into the router and click "Clone My PC" and it will copy the MAC address from your PC to the router, but there's really no point. MAC address spoofing only takes place on the local network, so no harm done.

Clean Up After Yourself

Don't make the mistake of then immediately logging into the social network and creating a new account, because there's still a way they can spot you. You've still got the cookies in your browser from your last session, and in the case of Digg those are long term and point back to your previous id. If you don't want to lose all your cookies across all sites, then instead of clearing all cookies, in Firefox you can go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Show Cookies. Scroll down to the name of the site and click "Remove Cookies".

Another thing to keep in mind are alliances, such as Digg and Facebook. Digg can't see your Facebook cookies (think about that, it would be a huge security violation of a browser allowed cross site cookie viewing), but if you click on a link to a Digg page from your Facebook account they'll see your Facebook id, and they know how to match that up with your previous Digg ids. I know someone that claims to have been busted that way, so just be aware.