Suspended Twitter Accounts and How To Restore Them

As much as it pains us to share this with you, a couple of weeks ago our Twitter account got suspended.

At CollectivEdge we play by the rules and were racking our brains trying to work out what we’d done wrong. After an agonising 10 day wait we got our answer: nothing. Sometimes Twitter makes mistakes, and @CollectivEdge got swept up in suspension through no fault of our own *nudges halo back on head*

But this got us thinking about how you can recover your Twitter account if the same thing happens to you. If you’ve landed on this page because you’ve already had your account suspended, you’re probably freaking out about being unable to post a photo of your epic BLT sandwich right now, so let’s cut to the chase…

1.      Read the Rules

The Twitter Rules should be your go-to webpage if you find a nasty yellow suspension bar in place of your home feed. Read through this code of practice carefully and review your recent activity – have you followed hundreds of users in a matter of hours? Are you sending out automated ‘thanx for the follow’ type direct messages to new followers? If so then you may have indentified the cause of your suspension.

2.      Submit an appeal

Once you’ve worked out what you’ve done wrong, you need to appeal against the suspension by filing a ticket with the Twitter overlords.

The process for this is a simple one that can be done by following the links on your Twitter to this page. Be polite and concise with your appeal; getting angry will not help your case. If you genuinely don’t know what you’ve done wrong (as we didn’t) then say so, but if you have an inkling that it could be that third party app you’re using, or the spammy tweet you sent to all your followers last night, then ‘fess up.

3.      Reply to THAT email

Filing an appeal and following the above steps will result in Twitter sending you an email within 24 hours of your appeal. You MUST reply to this automated email for your query to enter the queue. If you skip this your appeal will be overlooked. Simply copy and paste your original appeal and hit send – it’s that simple.

4.      Create another account…

…if you need to. If you are a business or rely heavily on Twitter for work purposes then it can be a good idea to set up another account with a similar Twitter handle so that customers and followers can find you, on a temporary basis.

5.      Sit back and wait

This is the bit that hit us the hardest. We would religiously check our CollectivEdge Twitter account each morning, and after lunch and before we left the office every day. And once at 3am when one of the team couldn’t sleep. We Googled ‘twitter account suspension’ like crazy to see when our account might be likely to come back – three to five days is typically what we found – but it’s not uncommon to have to wait up to seven or even *gulp* 10 days.

After seven days it’s natural to want to chase up progress, so feel free to reply to that initial email again, but remember to keep things friendly.

Eventually you’ll receive an email notifying you of your appeal and the reason you were suspended in the first place. Don’t panic if your follow count reads ‘0’ – unless you were suspended for aggressive following tactics – as this should return to normal within a few hours.

Like all social media platforms, Twitter is a great way to increase your blog traffic and share your latest posts with your followers, but don’t put all your social eggs in one basket and always remember to play by the rules.