Twitter has updated it’s rules recently to reduce the amount of abuse in the Twitter network and these rules might well be changed as the system grows and evolves.

If you follow these guidelines, you’ll be able to grow a twitter following with targeted users and then be able to turn these followers into potential sales.  Be careful of outrageous claims that by following certain systems you can gain thousands of followers a day or 15,000 in a week.

This might have been possible in the past with certain techniques and software but as twitter cracks down on abuse it’s getting difficult.

These are the main rules that you need to be aware of that’s going to effect how you go about promoting your products and using Twitter as a marketing tool:

  • There are no limits on the amount of people that you can have following you. Aka “followers”.
  • You can only follow 2000 people initially Aka “following” (See next point)
  • To follow more than 2000 people you must maintain the ratio of followers/following to not go beyond 110%. For eg, if you have 5000 followers then you can follow up to a maximum of 5500. More on getting around this later on.

Getting your Account Banned

As I’ve mentioned previously Twitter is cracking down on abuse of the system so you need to make sure you can push the boundaries to use Twitter as effectively as you can without getting your account banned or suspended.  Keep the following points in mind when building your twitter profile and choosing who you are following:

  • Don’t follow too many users in one go.  Twitter has a lot of system monitoring and checking going on the background that detects abuse and will identify suspicious activity.  The last thing you want is for your account to be suspended.
  • If you tweets are of an advertising nature keep them to a minimum and make sure you add content and your human touch to your tweets rather than just using a robot to spam out your tweets.  You will quickly be identified as spammer and you’ll find your followers list decreasing rapidly.