Exactly What You’ll Find Here…

The following is based on some of my experiences with Twitter from building 2 different large-scale Twitter apps. One for a client and one for personal use. One of these is still running. The tips below can be applied to Twitter in general as well as WPTB specific applications. Some of the information below approaches the topic from a programmatic point of view to explain the cogs of the system. This will hopefully give you a good understanding of what to do and not do.

Firstly – WPTB doesn’t make any footprints that stand out from the sea of activity that Twitter gets everyday. The tweets made by WPTB look really good and non-spammy. The links go to your blog where there is relevant, related content. So long as you’re not trying to promote porn or pills then Twitter should be no problem for you.

That said – I don’t own Twitter and don’t control what they do. If you’re working at scale when autoblogging it’s inevitable that some accounts will get banned based purely on the numbers … BUT … I’ve only seen about 10-20 of my 1k WPTB test accounts go over the last 2/3 months. That’s a damn good percentage in my book.

What Gets You Banned From Twitter?

Lets work backwards. If we know what Twitter doesn’t like we can simply not do it. Here’s a list of factors that based on my experience help you to get the “account suspended” message:

1. Tweeting blatant spam or prohibited content
2. Getting reported by other users (probably because of #1)
3. Insane numbers of follows and/or unfollows
4. Mass account creation done wrong

That’s it. If you watch out for the above 4 points you’re going to make all your accounts last much, much longer.

What Doesn’t Get You Banned?

1. Mass tweeting
2. Mass account creation done right
3. Lots of tweets with links
4. Using different IP’s to post each time
5. Posting to multiple accounts from 1 IP (within reason)

Some of these may not be obvious but I’ve found that I don’t get banned using any and all of these 5 things.

So What Should You Do?

In any situation like this it’s about keeping a low profile and fitting in. The more things you can do that ordinary users do the more Twitter will leave you alone. So what are some of the patterns of a normal, active Twitter user?

They tweet a lot, use 3rd party scripts to tweet via the API, manage accounts with tools like TweetDeck etc. So basically they will be making lots of requests to Twitter from different IP addresses about a variety if subjects.

Twitter needs to make sure that they only ban accounts that they are 90%+ sure are spam. They can’t ban a ton of legitimate users – even if thier tweeting patterns look weird. This is where you’re able to fit in – the grey area.

9 times out of 10 when I investigate any Twitter ban the issue is incorrect account creation. This is the one area where Twitter can really crack down and eliminate accounts. It’s the one time when the account activity is most unlike that of a normal user. Once an account is up and running it’s harder for Twitter to automatically identify what they believe to be a “bad” account. With this in mind you should check out the short Q&A below and the checklist…

Do You Need Friends On Your Accounts?

Both having Twitter friends – and not having them have advantages. Obviolsy if you’ve got a bunch of friends then more people will see your tweets in their tweet streams and you may get more clicks. The other side of the coin is that with lots of friends (and auto-tweeting) you’ve only got a larger, more dedicated list of people to report you.

Ideally, lots of friends are great but you have to automate this in certain ways to avoid getting banned. The good news is that when you automate it correctly – you’re accounts get real people tweeting to them saying how great you are

Common Problems & Answers

1. All my accounts have been banned just hours or days after creation!!!
   When this happens it has a very clear cause. In 99% of cases this “early slap” means that the accounts weren’t created correctly and triggered some type of flag/filter with Twitter. If this happens you should go over the checklist to try and find out where the hole in your technique could be.
2. My accounts are vanishing at a steady rate, one by one
   Apart from Twitters aggressive checking applied to new accounts, the next best way to get banned is to have other users report your account. Enough of these reports and it seems like you’ll get auto-banned if the account is really crap. If the account is good then you might get a Twitter employee give your account a 3 second glance to decide if it’s spam of not. Slow and steady degredation of your accounts probably means that you’re getting reported by other users. Some solution to this are: make more posts without links; RT other users; slow down your posting rate.
3. Things have been going fine for months… then boom! I lost a ton of accounts!
   I’ve had this done to me a while ago during some testing and from what I can tell it’s just a case of being unluck. What I think happens is that one of your accounts gets reported enough to raise attention. Your account is then looked into by a reviewer and using various tool that they’ll have – try and find links between this account any any others. If they do – it’s bye bye time.

Twitter Check-list:

Here’s a list of questions (with explanations) that can serve as a checklist to make sure you’re doing things in the best possible way.
This is the future proof ultra-paranoid list for staying safe with Twitter…

1. Hosting: Are you on a shared server, VPS or dedicated?
   A shared host could have not only other users running WPTB, but other Twitter scripts as well. These may all be sharing that IP’s hourly API limit from Twitter – meaning you might not get much action because of others using the API. Ideally you would have 1 or more IP’s one one server to use for each batch of blogs but it’s not essential. The next best option is a cheap VPS with 1 IP that’s yours.
2. Number of Blogs: Have you got other blogs on this server running the plugin?
   Same type of principle as #1. The more requests going to Twitter from one IP address the more you gain attention. On a shared host you have little control over this but on a VPS for example you can run multiple blogs with WPTB fine – just remember not to overdo it. I can’t define “overdo it” for you as it depends on a lot of factors but I’ve run around 15 blogs from 1 IP before without problems.
3. Account Source: Where (or who) did you buy the accounts from – or did you create them yourself?
   This is important. Very important. The bottom line is that if you buy the accounts you’re never sure exactly how they’re made but if you make them yourself it (usually) takes time and proxies.
4. IP Diversity: When the accounts were created, was each one made form a different IP address?
   You really should not be creating more than one Twitter account – per IP address – per day. There are many reasons for this but all of them boil down to avoiding a ban. Think about this: If you buy some Twitter accounts do you really think the seller is going to do this when they could use the same proxy multiple times and make more money? Didn’t think so. This rule applies to your dedicated IP’s – but especially proxies as you never know who else has been talking to Twitter via that IP. One final point here: if you’re using public proxies Twitter can tell as anything less than an elite anonymous proxy sends extra stuff in the header identifying it as a proxy or even gogin away your info. Do you think Twitter is going to keep accounts active for long if they were registered by proxy?
5. Profile: Did each account have a profile image, custom background and bio text?
   With the aim of acting as “human” as we can – each account should have some changes made to it once it’s setup. I usually set everything up (background images, profile pic, random bio etc) and if I suspect that this works a bit like applying for a loan. The more information you give the bank (or Twitter) the more points you get. Get over a certain threshold and you’re golden.
6. Account Name: Please tell me you don’t use names like “superman58365″ or “bill_jones85″?
   Mass account creators do this – people don’t on Twitter. This is a transparent give-away sign that could blow everything for you. What you need is (ideally) not to be checking these names first with Twitter but finding unique names each time. Weird name combos do the trick without numbers. You can also query Google
7. Verified Email: Do you verify the Twitter email address soon after creating the account?
   Why do you think Twitter has started asking for (optional) email verification? To help identify more “bad” accounts. You need to act human so you must verify this email address. This also means that you need email addresses.
8. Starter Tweets: Did each account have several tweets posted to it shortly after it was created?
   What’s the first thing most people do when they get an account? It’s a tweet like “w00t!”, “Hello World!”, or “I just ate breakfast”. Make sure you add a couple of these after creating an account. It helps. Just makes absolutely sure that this “starer tweet” is NOT a duplicate across other account or you won’t last long.
9. Waiting Time: How long were the accounts left between creation, and loading into WTB?
   This dead-time between creating the account and starting to regularly tweet another sign that the account is not human. Account sellers will register a few thousand accounts ready to sell the shift them over a week or two. During this time the accounts have already (I presume) been marked in some way so that Twitter can do some deeper checking once anything happens on that account. It’s quite common to receive a batch of “good” account only to start using them and find they drop like flies. If you’ve done everything else (mostly) right – then the waiting period will explain this.
10. Tweet Diversity: Do your accounts tweet/follow each other? (bad)
    You’ve just got 100 accounts loaded up to promote a niche. They are in a tool (WPTB or something else) and stuff is happening. All is going well for a while then you get hit hard and loose most of them. This sucks – especially when most have 1-10k followers. The advice here is don’t intermingle your account if you can help it.

Summary: Put on your tin-foil hat, load up your elite proxies and get cracking because doing this manually is a time-sucking pain. I’ll make this point one last time: do you really think an account seller is going to go through all that to create a few accounts?

Solution: A “solution” to this (at least for me) would mean I could create a decent number of stable accounts each day and stay under the radar. I don’t want to build up an account for it to get nuked days later. Unfortunately, there isn’t such a solution right now – at least that I’m aware of. It’s currently a case of trying to find good sellers who do as much of it as possible, doing it manually or using a combination of software to each to a piece.

How Can WPTB Help?

There are a number of features planned to (hopefully) help you avoid even having to worry about all of the above. Here are some highlights…

• Organic Twitter account creator – builds accounts daily and ass them to WTB ready for tweeting.
• Enhanced Twitter account management including “filler” tweets and auto RT’ing of other users
• Possibly a built in proxy collector to power & automate this section.
• A couple of cool ideas that (if implemented) will mean you don’t even have to use proxies to create accounts.
• Automatic email verification of Twitter links.

If Twitter’s So Tough – What Do You Do For Traffic?

I’ll tell you something I didn’t want to mention – and I’ve even thought about changing the plugin name because of it. The plugin’s called “WP Tweet Bomb” so you would assume (and rightly so) that it’s main punch would be in it’s power with Twitter. With TweetGazette I’ve had awesome success with Twitter of course, but when I was building the plugin I supprised myself with this…

Whilst WPTB is pretty damn good with Twitter – it’s better with Google traffic. Here’s a screen shot from TweetGazette’s stats. It shows where all the traffic came from for the life of the site (it was setup with the plugin on 15th Nov, 2009):

It’s obvious that Google was the king daddy for traffic here. TweetGazette has got many thousands of pages indexed in Google (about 7k last check) and just recently the traffic has shot up to 2.5k uniques or more every day. The thing I find most interesting here is that on this domain I only actually used the plugin for 2 weeks in November and it’s been off since. The traffic has grown on it’s own.

If I had to I would pinpoint these 3 things as being the most beneficial to the traffic TG’s getting:

1. A very high post frequency with WPTB content
2. Professional WP theme
3. Smart collection of WP plugins

Those 3 were the main winners. There were extra features that did have positive effects like the Tweeting, the auto indexer feature and the “Instant Links” button in WPTB – but imo the best feature about this plugin is the autoblogger.

You can discuss any of this info in the forum.

Related posts:

1. Twitter Account Sources
2. Post Frequency
3. DeDuping and AutoFollow are built into v1.1
4. Plugins for AutoBlogs
5. $10 / Day / Blog