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HT @AllTwitter

Infographic by- GO-Gulf.com Web Design Company

Number of Users on Popular Social Networking Sites

Unique Monthly Visits on Top Social Networking Websites

Male-Female Ratio

Time Spend by Average Social networking user per month

Age Demographics of Social Networking Users

Estimated User Worth of popular Social networking sites

Many people don’t use Twitter search, so Twitter has worked hard to get more “average” users to try it, particularly by putting various search results on the “Discover” tab.

But for those users that rely on and regularly use Twitter search, there is a problem: Twitter search doesn’t show all tweets by default.

The solution is to click “All” (instead of the default “Top”) to see all tweets. But now, Twitter does NOT even offer that option on the mobile website!

What do you call search results that don’t show MOST results? I call it broken:

Since mobile is the only access many people use when they connect to Twitter, is this censorship?

99% of Tweets Missing?

As one user pointed out, even a popular hashtag with 20 tweets every two minutes or so might only show just 20 tweets in the past several days—that’s hundreds of missing tweets Twitter won’t show you.

I get that Twitter is trying to simplify and popularize different features, but if I had a document where 99% of the words went missing because the software wanted to “simplify” it for me, I’d be pissed.

Twitter has made search work more like “Discover” where they want to find a few things that might interest you, and hide everything else. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they removed or further hid the “all” option from the main website and left it only available through the API, so that you had to use apps to access search results.

Censorship?

Twitter obviously doesn’t even want new mobile users to know that they can find all tweets, saying in effect “we have all the information, but you don’t need to know that most of it exists.”

So now that Twitter has just shown their willingness to hide most tweets, what if Twitter removes the “all” option from the main site and the API and it no longer exists in public anywhere?

Twitter is famously opposed to governments telling them to release private data about users, and always fights at the minimum to make such requests public. So Twitter fights governments on behalf of users. But if Twitter itself takes away our access to see all tweets, who can we complain to?

Greed?

Of course, Twitter will sell you access to all tweets through its partners. Could this mean Twitter will one day make viewing “all” tweets available only to people that pay?

When Google used to have a social media search option included all tweets, they were paying Twitter a lot for the privilege. And Twitter dropped their contract with Google as soon as they could, and have been opposed to reinstating it (with many different reasons given)

Selling access to tweets is already a big money-maker for Twitter (it used to be their main source of profit). Might they be planning to only make access all tweets available to Twitter partners, or through paid “premium” Twitter accounts?

The Value Of Search

Complete search results are disappearing right and left.

Google in fact followed Twitter’s lead, and made the “all” search results never come up by default. What you see in Google nowadays is something called “Search Plus Your World.” You have know what icon to click to see the old, complete search results.

Facebook uses what they call their “Edgerank algorithm” to hide many status updates from you. There is a whole industry built around teaching you how to get your Facebook status message to break through the algorithm so that more people will see it.

Access to complete and accurate information is getting harder and harder to come by, which, considering the potential of the internet to provide access to information, is amazing.

Part of the bright promise of the internet was access to information for the average person. But social media creates false rumors that spread like wildfire, clutters up our feeds with misleading and useless information, and now more and more won’t let us even search through all available information.

I’ll tell you frankly, I don’t like the direction things are heading.

The journal Psychological Reports reported on a test designed to help determine if you’re addicted to your favorite social media site. It uses the ‘six core elements of addiction’ that doctors use to identify alcoholics and drug addicts.

People who are organised, ambitious and extroverted are less likely to be addicts, said psychologist Cecilie Schou Andreassen, who developed the Addiction Scale. But, users who go to bed late and get up late are more likely to be addicted, she said: having a ‘delayed sleep wake rhythm’ makes you more likely to be addicted.

While you shouldn’t take this test for someone else (people should only take it for themselves), I definitely forsee a lot of parents and significant others using this to try to determine if their child or significant other has a serious problem.

How to Test Yourself

Answer the each of the six statements below according to the following scale: 1 = Very rarely; 2 = Rarely; 3 = Sometimes; 4 = Often and 5 = Very often.

1. You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook/Twitter  or plan your use of Facebook/Twitter.
2. You feel an urge to use Facebook or Twitter more and more.
3. You use Facebook or Twitter in order to forget about personal problems.
4. You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook or Twitter without success.
5. You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook or Twitter.
6. You use Facebook or Twitter so much that it has had a negative impact on your job or studies.

Simply total how many times your answer was either “Often” (4) or “Very Often” (5). If you replied “Often” or “Very Often” a combined total of 4 or more times, then you could be addicted!

Using Twitter to connect with others is one of the keys to success. But many people are very immature in how they try to connect.

Tweeting “follow me” or “please retweet this” to people you have no connection with is a typical bad example.

I’ve written about the right way to connect on Twitter here.

In short: Find people who have shared interests with that you feel good about supporting and help them achieve their missions. The more people that you help, the more people will help you.

But some people see how badly immature people try to connect on Twitter and misunderstand my advice that connecting is important.

Julie Ershadi recently posted this comment about my advice on making connections:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the advice in this post seems catered to a really specific audience, maybe people who are interested in using social media to network just for the sake of networking.

This post seems to de-emphasize the importance of the actual content you post on your Twitter feed — I know it doesn’t exist in a vacuum (I’ve read those advice columns too), but isn’t your own brand, your own product, your own content ultimately what matters most?

If you fill your gap by getting Ashton Kutcher to @ reply you five times, and then his followers click through to find a Twitter feed equivalent to the back-rubbing and boot-licking blather that numbs minds at networking conferences in garish hotels across the country, then what’s the point?

Julie’s concerns about content and immature motivations are both valid. This was my response:

Branding matters. Content matters. Absolutely. I’ve written about that elsewhere. I can’t cover all topics in each post. This post is about connections.

Just because there are people who try to connect for immature reasons in immature ways doesn’t mean that connecting itself is an immature activity.

The ways people connect cover a huge range. There are CEOs who connect with other CEOs and do multi-million dollar deals, and there are teenage girls who tweet to every boy celebrity an inanity of nearly impossible to understand emoticons and follow requests.

And no matter how hard someone tries, they won’t be able to “fill in the gap” by getting a celebrity to reply to (or retweet) them. That will pretty much NEVER work.

Yes, thousands of immature people try to get celebrities to follow and retweet them. But don’t worry about those immature people—most will grow up eventually. This post is written for the grown-ups.

Grown ups who chat with one another about issues that are of importance to them both rarely produce content that would be described as “back-rubbing and boot licking,” but there are certainly feeds like that out there.

Connections between grownups matter, and not enough people make a sincere effort to make those connections. Many of those that do have found it be the most powerful use of their time, so I felt it important to share their perspective.

Thanks for your focus, and helping me to clarify

The authors of an academic paper covered by the Harvard Business Review asked respondents to rate 43,000 tweets as either:

1. Worth Reading
2. Not Worth Reading
3. Just OK

The overall results:

The authors pointed out that

“…results suggest that users tolerate a large amount of less-desired content in their feeds. We find that users value information sharing and random thoughts above me-oriented or presence updates.”

Here’s an edited version of their original infographic summarizing the results (sample tweets are real, but users have been changed):

HT Marketing Savant

The April 2012 Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec [pdf] had some fascinating stats:

1. Web based attacks increased by 36% with over 4,500 new attacks each day. ►Tweet this stat
2. 403 million new variants of malware were created in 2011, a 41% increase of 2010. ►Tweet this stat
3. SPAM volumes dropped by 13% in 2011 over rates in 2010. ►Tweet this stat
4. 39% of malware attacks via email used a link to a web page. ►Tweet this stat
5. Mobile vulnerabilities continued to rise, with 315 discovered in 2011. ►Tweet this stat

But most shocking of all was probably this chart:

That’s right, porn websites are barely even in the top ten most dangerous category. The theory is that they make money, so don’t need to use malware to make money, and they are very web savvy at keeping their sites free from infections.

Wouldn’t you like Google to start sending crowds of people to read your website?

Of course, by sharing your posts on social media, you’ve already taken one of the most important steps. For example, getting mentioned on Twitter does improve your ranking in Google search results.

But a lot of what you read on the topic of SEO is complicated and difficult. For example, it’s tough and time-consuming to get a lot of other people to link to your website, and do you really want to learn how Latent Dirichlet Allocation works?

Instead, here I’ve super-simplified some advanced techniques for writing blog posts that will help Google send more visitors your way (known as on-page SEO). (To see the full advanced video this is based on, I’ve included it at the end. Or for a transcript, go here.)

The basics of on-page SEO include things such as learning the words people use when searching for your topic (keyword research) and including those words in your title, first sentence and elsewhere. But there’s a lot more you can do, and it’s easy!

1. Too Much Hyper-Focus Is Bad

Ensure that you talk at least a little about things very closely related to your topic. If you talk about “Twitter” you should probably also talk about something like “tweets,” “social media,” “followers” or something similarly closely related at least once somewhere.

I don’t just mean use more synonyms. Just make sure that you expand at least a little on closely related topics once or twice. It makes it more plausible that this is a real human writing, rather than a machine generated page. If you want exact tips on what to talk about when writing a post, or to measure how well you’re doing, try this advanced optimization tool.

2. If You Wander Off, Make Sure You Come Back

Make sure that if you get off topic, or stop using words that related directly to your topic, that you at least get some of those words back into the middle and end of your document. If you start talking about one thing, and then appear to switch to another topic, Google may not be able to decide which topic you’re REALLY talking about.

So use words related to your topic in the title, first paragraph, somewhere in the middle, and near the end to help Google KNOW that your page is indeed about that topic.

3. Link To Good Stuff

Link to the best stuff you can find elsewhere on the web. When the New York Times starting doing that more on some pages, Google started sending more people to those pages. When I find a great post, I tweet it, and I consider whether I might want to say something about the topic myself. If I do, I always link to the great content.

Google in essence wants to reward pages that link to good stuff by sending more people to them.

4. Make Visitors Happy

If you expect people to do something (read to the end, click a link, register, stay on the page a long time) and they’re not doing that thing, fix the page or try something else. Google keeps track of how happy visitors are with a page and a website, and they get more clever all the time at figuring out how happy people are.

5. Be More Unique

A simple way to do this: add one more thing.

No media? Add an image or video. No analysis, analogies, related stories? Write in a little uniqueness. Of course, if you favor wordplay and clever titles, that will help, but it may make it a bit unclear what you’re talking about…so don’t overdo it!

Google rewards content that is more unique. The simplest (but not easiest) way to achieve this is to write really long posts, and so adding something to a shorter post is often helpful.

But one of the easiest ways to achieve this appears to be by using the occasional big word here and there (suitable for a more advanced reading level). So keep that thesarus site bookmarked! (But don’t overdo it—simple words are better for helping people understand your meaning.)

The advanced version of these advanced tips:

It can be hard to have a conversation just through tweets. Sometimes it reminds of that classic vaudeville skit “Who’s on First?”

Recently I wrote some blog posts to provide folks with questions on a topic a forum to provide more details, but many chose to only communicate via tweets.

One gentleman, Dr. Jason B. Whitman, National Republican Policy Chairman, Young Republican National Federation, was very easy to talk to, even though the topic was very politically charged, and said fairly early on that he disagreed with me.

Since I’m kind of agnostic politically, you might have thought the communication would be contentious, but we each clarified our thoughts to each other a few times, and ended up understanding each other quite well, and found quite a lot of agreement.

Another person was not so easy to communicate with. Here’s a (fake) conversation that would be an analogy of our attempt at communicating by tweets:

• Him: The car was towed
• Me: Which car?
• Him: I’m giving you the information you asked for: The car was towed
• Me: Yes, I get that the car was towed, but which car is being referred to?
• Him: This is a direct quote from the source: “The car was towed.”
• Me: Perhaps if you could share some more of what the source said, I could understand better.
• Him: I can’t share more than that, for privacy reasons.
• Me: I understand! That’s a very good reason. I’ll settle for not understanding very clearly, then.
• Him: You’re not making sense. I’m telling you straight from the source, this  is how it is: the car was towed.
• Me: Yes, that makes sense to a point, but what I don’t know is which car was towed.
• Him: Just so you know, you’re not talking to me anymore, you’re talking to the source.
• Me: You’re not the source.
• Him: Your argument is with what source said.
  I‘m NOT them exactly, so report it straight with no ”conjecture.“
• Me, to myself: Nope, I’m not going to repeat the question again. Must…not…repeat.

Obviously, we got frustrated near the end …and for his part, I don’t blame him! Tweets can be a really tough way to clarify tricky topics. There were probably three times the number of tweets I’ve shown here, so if you want to take me to task in the comments, feel free. I’d be glad to clarify. I still don’t have an answer to my question.

How Can You Make Things Clearer?

Here are a few tips that I find myself returning to.

1. First, of course, if you can switch to email or phone or a forum such a blog commenting, it can help. Gives you more room to clarify. But some people resist that.
2. One thing I do sometimes is to try to restate things from the other person’s point of view. (In this particular case, I tried writing my third blog post somewhat in that way.)
3. Another tip is to be sociable. When they’re right, say “You’re right!” or “I agree.” Don’t leave agreement unstated. Similarly, if they’re doing something you appreciate, say so.
4. I also like to point out where I’m giving opinion versus fact. Generally, because even though if I’m stating facts my opinion is still in there somewhere, I try to point that out. Don’t try to be the expert with all the answers.
5. If someone gets really annoyed, I’ll go back through the conversation to see where I could have been clearer, or could have understood better or quicker. Then I’ll apologize and try to do better.
6. If someone doesn’t seem to understand a question, I’ll drop it or approach from as different an angle as I can think of. Repeating the question (as you can see from the above) doesn’t work too well. I actually tried some different topics but we kept coming back to the one that caused confusion.
7. Decide what you really want from the conversation. If what it has turned into doesn’t really serve any purpose, drop it, say the most gracious words you can about the person, and indicate that you’ll have to leave the conversation for awhile.

Disclaimer: This is conjecture based on past communication from Twitter, and investigating different situations people have shared with me. I’m going to simply state things as though they are fact, but again, this is just my conjecture, based on experience.

I’m writing this so that someone is under attack can know what to do to preserve their account and prevent it from being suspended, and if it is suspended, help restore it and prevent it from being easily suspended in the future.

That said, I dread writing this post. People will begin immediately misconstruing it as “if enough people report someone for spam, Twitter will suspend them.” That is NOT true.

I’m going to write this in this order: 1. Here’s how auto-suspension works. 2. Here’s how you can avoid an attack on your account causing it to be auto-suspended.

1. How Auto-Suspension Due To Spam Reports Should Work

First of all, you can’t get someone suspended in an obvious way: You can’t just get a bunch of friends together, then all start reporting an established account as spam. That will NOT work, because Twitter doesn’t want that to happen. Is it absolutely impossible? No. Twitter adjusts their auto-suspension algorithm all the time, so anything is possible. But it’s very, very unlikely. Plus, it isn’t necessary, because there’s a more nefarious trick that can be played against an account.

Also, there are a LOT of combinations of reasons that accounts can be suspended. Automated following and unfollowing is one of the big ones. Auto follow and unfollow and you can quickly be suspended, even if there are no other flags against your account.

Here, I’m only going to focus on how groups of spam reports get accounts suspended, because this is the “attack vector” that allow a group to coordinate against an account.

2. How Twitter Wants Auto-Suspension To Work

Again, we’re not covering all scenarios here. Just the mass spam reporting situation.

If an account begins spamming people that it has no engagement with, and those people receiving tweets report the account for spam, Twitter will auto-suspend the account at some point. The three main factors that determine how quickly it gets suspended are:

1. Newer accounts are suspended faster.
2. Accounts that send a lot of tweets to people not engaged with are suspended faster than accounts that send few tweets.
3. The faster and more people in total who respond to unwanted tweets by reporting for spam, the faster the account is auto-suspended.

3. How To Prevent Groups From Getting You Auto-Suspended

To get someone’s account suspended, you need to trick them into looking like a spammer repeatedly and then report them repeatedly from the accounts they are tweeting to. (Twitter calls this “multiple unsolicited mentions.”) Reporting from non-engaged accounts won’t work. One method is by saying things that they might want to respond to. Typically terrible, nasty things

But the key is: You can’t use the username of the account you want to get suspended (much). The reason is that if you do, when they respond, it looks like a conversation—a tweet went out with with their username, they responded. Twitter’s automated system then thinks everything is okay.

You need to say things that get them to respond without using the username you want to have suspended.

4. Your First Step In Protecting Your Account

So, if this happens to you, the first thing to know is this:

DO NOT rapidly send tweets to lots of people that will likely not want to hear from you.

If you do, and many of them respond to your tweet by reporting you for spam, you’ve fallen into their auto-suspension trap: They’ve made you look like a spammer. Unfair? Absolutely!

What you CAN do is create a new account with a variation of your name, and respond from that account.

It will likely be suspended, but since you don’t need it, it doesn’t matter. But don’t create more than two or three accounts from the same IP address, because Twitter may suspend them, suspecting you are “mass creating serial accounts.” If you need to, have friends create accounts for you.

Alternatively, you can have friends reply on your behalf. But they also need not to send too many tweets. Mostly this happens in the form of someone telling their community that bad things are being said, and them community members decide of their own accord to communicate with the “evil-doers.”

5. Is This Real? Does This Work?

Someone that sends enough “unsolicited” tweets that are then marked as spam will absolutely be suspended.

So yes, it’s a real and serious problem.

Twitter is essentially tying your hands from sending a lot of @ responses to  people who are saying nasty things if they are not using your @username in their tweets.

The more important question is can your account be suspended solely because a lot of people that you are NOT interacting (non-engaged: not following/followed, no conversations) with report you for spam. In other words, do you have to fall into their “trap” of sending them “unsolicited” @replies that they can then mark as spam?

Here other factors have to be taken into account:

For example, if you have a newer account, lots of spam reports from non-engaged accounts CAN get you auto-suspended. No “trap” is required.

But, if you have an account that is several months old with lots of engaging tweets, it is impossible for spam reports from non-engaged accounts to be the sole reason your account is auto-suspended. At least, that’s how Twitter wants things to work, and they make serious efforts to see that this IS how it works. And, if your account has been suspended before, for whatever reason, it’s easier for it to be suspended again (see point #8 below).

6. Your Second Step In Protecting Your Account

Don’t @reply to lots of people in under an hour or less!

How many is too many? Very hard to say. But if you send just 5 unwanted tweets in a short period, and all report you as spam, you will almost certainly be flagged by Twitter’s algorithm. The exact number and time that leads to auto-suspension is always going to be unclear, because Twitter tweaks their algorithm regularly.

But, if you don’t want to create a new account, don’t want to engage your community in the “fight” (and don’t want to simply ignore the tweets against you), at least avoid the main trap! Spread your tweets out.

Whenever I see an account suspended that has sent several “unsolicited” @replies just before receiving a suspension warning about sending @replies, this is the most obvious cause. Here’s what that looks like:

While Twitter is accurate in saying you “sent multiple unsolicited mentions to other users” they have no way of knowing that you may have been baited into doing so by folks waiting to report you for spam when you send them a mention.

Fair? No, not in many scenarios. But it’s hard for Twitter to tell the difference between you and a spammer when this happens.

7. Why Does This Get Your Account Auto-Suspended?

When an account created to send out spam starts sending it, it knows it will be suspended shortly. So spammers test how many spam messages they can send before they get suspended, and how quickly then can send them. The reason speed often works in their favor is that people don’t see and report as spam right away. Every minute they can keep sending is valuable to them. So a bunch of tweets close together that all get reported make you look a lot like a spammer.

Of course, Twitter tries to combat this by adjusting their algorithm to guess if tweets are spam, even in the absence of immediate reports. It doesn’t work very well yet in this scenario, sadly. The spam reports are still an important part of the system in most scenarios.

But the takeaway is the same: don’t be tricked into looking like a spammer.

8. If Your Account Gets Suspended

At this point, there is very bad news, and very good news. The very bad news is that once your account has been suspended, it will very likely be suspended again. Although I’ve only researched a handful of these scenarios, in all but one case the account was suspended three times.

(Again, this isn’t about all scenarios. We’re talking only about the scenario where people are reporting you for spam.)

The good news? Once you contact Twitter, they will often intervene manually to protect your account from additional auto-suspensions. (And then you can @reply to those people without easily being auto-suspended again. Not that I recommend it.)

So, what can you do?

Open a ticket with Twitter via http://bit.ly/TWICKET and let them know you believe people are using mass action to try to get your account suspended. Also contact sympathetic media or bloggers who can report the likely mass action against you. Twitter will see your “error” in sending “multiple unsolicited mentions”…but they typically also check to see the mass action at work, and protect you.

This is an important step! Just entering the captcha in the form and reactivating your account is not enough! Because what did NOT work to get your account suspended the first time—unengaged people reporting you for spam—WILL now be able to get you suspended again, whether you tweet or not.

Also, do NOT send multiple tickets to Twitter. Just send one, and reply to the automated email you get in reply that you still need help, and describe your situation. If you do not get an automated email response, check your spam folder, and check to see what email you are using with your Twitter account (in case you have forgotten).

You MUST get that email and reply to it and wait. If you create multiple tickets, each will cause the previous one to be deleted (yes, that’s Twitter’s policy) and your new one will go to the back of the queue.

9. Summary

Don’t get tricked into ”multiple unsolicited mentions,” and if you do, contact Twitter right away, as your account is in serious danger of being repeatedly suspended, and you will need Twitter’s help.