I’ve been to Twitter Jail for the past few weeks and it wasn’t pretty. The effects are still being felt. (This hasn’t just happened to me, but a few of my Twitter-buds as well). In short, we used some tools online which, for some reason, flagged our accounts. My @desireescales account was (and still is) invisible. If you do a search for “Desiree Scales” or @desireescales, my other account @soclmediacoach comes up. I was forced to create this other account because @desireescales was also banned from hashtag use so I couldn’t participate in the #sbbuzz Tweetchat. Whenever I used a #, my account didn’t show up in the #sbbuzz timeline so I had to create an alter-ego. (Try keeping track of two accounts, I can’t imagine keeping up with any more like some people out there!)

What’s bad about this is that if someone wants to find me on Twitter, they will find @soclmediacoach in the search results and not @desireescales and follow the former. This now means I have to update both accounts! Also, during the past #sbbuzz chats, people starting following the wrong identity. I had to politely ask them to be inconvenienced and follow the original @desireescales. Confusing, eh?

I think the problem was using www.hootsuite.com to post the same tweets more than once a day. Now, you would think that makes sense since Twitter gets a different crowd at 2pm than, let’s say, 8 pm. In fact, my friend Guy Kawasaki shared this idea with me in an issue of Entrepreneur Magazine from a few months ago. I guess I shouldn’t have listened.

The response I received from Twitter after filling out a ticket and waiting two weeks was:

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Lukester, Jul 02 02:29 pm:
It would appear that you gave your username and login to an
advertising program which resulted in you being filtered from search
due to the number of identical updates. I’ve cleared this flag;
however, please be aware that engaging in this sort of behavior can
result in you being filtered from search.
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He didn’t even detail which one so I’m sitting here still guessing at what I did. I also used www.tweepular.com because I was getting hundreds of followers a day due to my blog posts and podcasts at www.bellawebdesignblog.com and couldn’t follow everyone back one by one. Can you imagine how timely that would be? Tweepular made it much easier to follow everyone back at one time and unfollow those who were too sales-pitchy or MLMs. So, I’m still sitting here in the dark and can’t really explain to you why this happened.

As of today, Lukester tells me:

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Lukester, Jul 07 05:02 pm:
your accounts look fine and will probably be back in search soon.

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I don’t believe him, but I have to keep the faith that I’ll be showing up in search soon and @soclmediacoach can go retire somewhere in Arizona. Stay tuned and if you’ve experienced something similar, please share it in the comments.