For people who don’t know what Tweetdeck is, it’s a handy and free  little website that helps out businesses who don’t want to spend all day on twitter sending tweets and following new accounts or employ a dedicated member of staff to manage the account and send out regular tweets about services and products because tweetdeck allows you to schedule your tweets so you can spend half a day creating tweets for the whole week or even a whole month.

For Internet marketing companies who manage multiple twitter accounts on behalf of other businesses its fantastic because it allows you to add every account you manage to the tweekdeck platform so you are no longer logging in and out of individual twitter accounts, it can all  be done from tweetdeck.

Apart from the ability to schedule posts weeks or even months in advance you can also ‘like’ and ‘retweet’ between your accounts which is handy if you run a business account and a personal account, because of course you are going to ‘like’ and ‘retweet’ your business tweets, who doesn’t do this I’m mean your personal twitter profile reaches different people to your business one? right?

So Tweetdeck is a fantastic piece of software? Right? Well no not really… 1000’s of companies have had accounts suspended indefinitely simply by using Tweetdecks built in tools

Tweetdeck was fantastic when it started and was praised by many marketing companies like ourselves as a tool that reduced their workload and helped to give our clients a much better service all round, but in 2011 Tweetdeck was purchased by Twitter for a staggering £25million and feedback from the marketing community was that they where simply going to shut it down as it stopped users needing to visit and log into individual twitter accounts and advertisers do not want this.

But, contrary to what everybody in the industry thought at the time, Twitter kept Tweekdeck running and for the first few years nothing really changed and marketing companies all breathed a sigh of relief, however in recent years things have started to downhill, initially users reported a significant drop in speed, with Tweetdeck constantly failing to load or crashing the browser and people thought twitter where simply neglecting the software hoping people would just stop using it, but  after the initial backlash twitter got it’s act together and the software started to perform well again however during the past 12-18 months established twitter accounts started getting suspended for no good reason, accounts that had been live for years and tweeted only things relating to their own business/products an nothing political or right wing ( Yes twitter is left wing even though they claim to be impartial) got suspended.

As a marketing company we manage dozens of accounts and we had 8 accounts suspended in a single day, accounts that had been live since 2008-2009 owned by software companies, Web design companies, home improvement companies, training companies all furious at us thinking we had done something wrong, not only did we lose revenue in the form of their management fee but many threatened to sue us and it was the same across the marketing industry.

So how was this eventually linked to Tweetdeck?

If you’ve ever been suspended from Twitter you’ll know that you can’t get a straight answer, most emails are created by bots and simply link to twitter rules – non of which ever got broken – and appeals are simply a joke as no one answers them most of the time so a few marketing companies got together in an effort to find out what was triggering the suspension of legitimate business accounts.

After setting up 2 dozen accounts from different IP’s different countries and relating to different topics, business sectors and political views we went out to see it we could trigger a suspension and collect the data.

We managed accounts in different ways some tweeted outrageous views, some followed terrorist accounts (why these are still live is beyond me), some tweeted daily, some only retweeted other peoples tweets, some used vulgar language constantly and some tweeted adult content, but no account was suspended.

Then we added all of the  accounts to our tweekdeck and this is where the fun started.

With one business account we scheduled tweets for 3 to 4 weeks, some standard tweets, some tweets linking to our blog articles and the very next day the account was suspended, upon appeal we simply got the following automated response

We typically suspend accounts for violations of the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules) or Terms of Service (https://twitter.com/tos).

Account was never un-suspended and all subsequent emails sent to twitter where ignored.

With another account we used the “like from accounts” tool built into tweetdeck and liked posts from about accounts we managed, this account was suspended within minutes. This time the appeal worked and the response from twitter was

Your account was suspended after finding violations of the Twitter Rules. Specifically, our policies prohibiting spam, and fake or artificial account interactions and engagements.

We emailed twitter back to tell them that we only used tools provided by their software tweetdeck and if these tools are against Twitter rules then they should not be included in the software!

We got no response from twitter after resending this email 3 or 4 times over the course of a week

Another account was suspend almost right away for simply following the other accounts we have loaded into tweetdeck using built in tools again. This was another appeal that was simply ignored with no explanation as to way the account was suspended.

To get valid data we repeated what we have done with other accounts to see if we still got suspended and we did every time indicating that this was built into Tweekdeck.

In Summary

Our findings have shown us that twitter now has automated software is built into Tweetdeck, this was probably done during the time the speed was effected a couple of years ago. With this bot or nanny  installed they can directly detect violations of their rules and instantly suspend accounts.

As its the tools contained within their own software triggering these suspensions then you have to ask yourself “is Twitter so incompetent that they don’t realise that their own software violates their rules?” or are they well aware of this and are using what’s know in the criminal world as “entrapment” to make people stop using tweekdeck

Either way Twitter are getting the results they want because marketing companies especially are deleting their Tweekdeck accounts and either going elsewhere to a third party who simply uses Twitter API or they are writing their own automatedscripts. ( although many companies using twitters API to perform the similar tasks as Tweetdeck have been forced to close down in recent years after access was revoked due to violations… Mmmmm)

As more and more people stop using Tweekdeck, twitter will eventually close it citing lack of use, or they will reduce it’s functionality to a point that it becomes unusable and everyone will be forced to log into twitter.com each and every time they want to tweet, and this is when Twitter will be able to demand hugh sums from advertisers making the £25million they spent on it look like loose change.

We have asked twitter time and time again to respond to our findings regarding tweetdeck but they have declined to comment, which says it all…..