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.