Regaining Twitter
-
Our Twitter account had been hijacked by an ex-employee who refused to give it back. However we filed for copyright infringement and got access of our Twitter account back. The sad part is that Twitter could not leep our followers intact and we lost our fan base of over 30k followers. Now that we have control of the account, how should we go about regaining our followers? Just to give the community a better idea i'd like to point out that we are a leading news organization (dawn.com) of Pakistan. (Yes, we have internet and no we don't ride on camels!).
We posted a message on our FB account that has an even greater following but didn't get a good response as most followers on FB are local whereas 70% of our readership comes from the US alone! So how would you suggest regaining followers and also, is it better to operate an RSS feed or manually select the links to share on Twitter.
Thanks!
-
this is a good idea
-
Rishad, what did you end up doing in this case? I'm interested in hearing the answer, and if it makes for a good case study, you might think about submitting a YOUmoz post about it.
-
Ouch! My suggetion like others here on the forums: create a press release saying how you were ruined by an evil employee and throw your twitter name all over, make it almost viral to help you?
-
Once the article is up and running we can republish it to maybe even get you more followers - and then you can write another article about THAT!!
Win+win+win I think!
-
I'm not sure if the follower list is still available anywhere or not. But honestly there isn't much in the way of a operational way to approach this that I know of. I think Thomas and Dejan have said it best. The one thing I might add though - is if the follower list is still intact somewhere, perhaps tied to a different account (doesn't sound like it so this is a long shot) you can use export.ly to get a .csv of all of the followers the account had. You may be able to write a script but I'd suggest doing it manually - to contact them letting them know they need to re-follow and help spread the word.
Sorry about that
Going forward a tool like Cotweet is really nice b/c you can give people access without giving them control. I think HootSuite may offer similar functionality.
-
It seems there are a lot of sections of your site this could be apropriate for...perhaps a blog entry even rather than a full blown press statement? Might sit easier with the editorial board perhaps...
-
easy, show them how many links came to the site via twitter over a month/year period. That should get a bosses attention.
-
hmmm...if only I am able to convince the editorial!
-
This looks like a perfect news story for Dawn. If you do not have a list of the Twitter followers, release a press statement or article stating what happened and ask people to re-join.
-
Man, the list was lost courtesy of Twitter. They said, they could only transfer the username and not the followers. Although the hijacker was operating an RSS, we wanted more control and wanted to integrate it with FB and do other things. Mailing list, yea we have one for online subscribtions and not for the Twitter followers we had previously!
-
How was the list lost. Was the account terminated and re-created or did the hijacker affect the user base? Do you have a mailing list? That would seem the easiest way to regain the lost user base and give you a chance to wash the list as well and retain relevant followers only.
-
Hi Rishad,
To answer your second question first: I definitely prefer a manually curated list on twitter. Alternatively you can have one main twitter account with a currated list + a number of automated twitter accounts that send feeds from your vertical news segments.
I would simply start using your Twitter account the way it is supposed to be, and I am sure your followers will get back eventually. To speed things up, you could consider press releases, news stories and/or sponsored tweet that mentions your Twitter account was hijacked but is back - stronger than ever.
Good luck!
Thomas
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Twitter Cards via Wordpress/Yoast
Hi I had set up a Twitter card via Yoast interface in clients Wordpress site but now want to change the summary copy. I have also had a look at Tiwtter dev zone and cant see any way of editing via that Does anyone know how to do this (edit the twitter card) since seems that once its set up via Yoast you cant edit it ? Cheers Dan
Social Media | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Twitter stats
I am trying to increase the position of one of my deeper links (my site.com/targetpage) trying to use twitter to up this page as a new strategy. I have 18 on OSE for my twitter metrics but none on the deeper link (i havent tried yet for this). How do i actually get the a twitter metric score for this deeper link? Does the tweet have to be the actual target page URL? Or is it a twitter share button on the page? Confused how it works. Thanks, Chris
Social Media | | cjkimber0 -
Twitter cards - one account, various domains?
Hi guys, I have a number of events run by the same company, all with their own websites. For a number of reasons, these individual events don't have their own social channels. Instead, the company's main social channels are used to promote the events wherever possible. I want to implement twitter card markup into each of the sites and associate the markup with the company's main twitter account. Does anyone know whether it's possible to get twitter cards approved for one account across multiple domains? I'd hate to apply for one site using the account, only to find out I can't apply for others! So before I venture into the unknown, was hoping someone could shed some light on this. Cheers 🙂
Social Media | | cos20300 -
Identifying members on Twitter
We are a member based company. Membership is by business not individual. So for instance if your widget business is a member anyone with a [email protected] email address can sign up and use all our content, portals, etc. I want to take emails and figure out if they are on Twitter. I know Twitter allows you to search your contact list but this wouldn't be that. It would be a list of emails I create. Are there any tools or suggestions to do this in a efficient way besides searching each individual name on Twitter? Thanks for the help.
Social Media | | inhouseninja0 -
My Twitter Username was CHANGED by Twitter!
My twitter user name australia was changed by twitter to Australia1_ My original user name has been given to Toursim Australia. I never saw any correspondence about this from Twitter (I may have deleted it), nor from Tourism Australia. I have managed to send 2 related support requests to twitter; Once explaining I couldn't log in - and their reply was; "The email address you're writing from does not match the email on this account. For privacy reasons, we can't offer any more information about the email." Second time that my account was suspended - they replied; "If you're writing in about Australia1_ being suspended, this account is not currently suspended" I don't believe this can be a trademark issue because you cannot trademark a place name. I would love an explanation from twitter- Any tips?
Social Media | | RR5000 -
How to get a link on Twitter box in Huffington Post?
Hey guys, got a question about the Huffington Post and its Twitter widget - see screenshot attached HuffPo seems to be aggregating links somehow under the "Top links on this topic" heading within the Twitter widget. At first I thought this was an official Twitter wdget; http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets However, I can't find it on Twitter's site and I'm starting to think it's a custom widget possibly developed by HuffPo themselves. My question is how do I get my site to rank under their "Top links"? Is it feeding on Twitter presence or is it feeding from Google News or through something else? Many thanks in advance for any light shed on this topic Edit: Link to Huffington Post page example from screenshot Screen%252520shot%2525202011-10-24%252520at%25252017.26.54.png
Social Media | | JDauncey0 -
Multiple twitter accounts for Different countries...
Ok, so we currently operate in the UK, Australia, Ireland, Spain and France. Currently we have a different twitter accounts for each Country. This can be difficult to manage as we are going it all from the UK. I can understand that having separate accounts for foreign language countries is perhaps suitable (we have foreign staff tweeting in their native tongue), but my question is this: Is it worth just tweeting all English speaking activity from one account. I mean at the end of the day we are one company, and also our activity in other countries won't effect our followers, in fact wouldn't it just make them realise we are a global brand? What are the advantages and disadvantages of gradually deleting the other accounts and tweeting all English stuff from the one account? Cheers,
Social Media | | esendex0 -
Impact of URL shorteners in Twitter feeds
Hello, Will use of URL shorteners [bit.ly/tiny.cc or equivalent] in Twitter feeds impact the rankings of a target pages? As I understand it Twiitter links are automatically generated as nofollows so I am assuming the published link is irrelevant. Is this still the case? If we do continue to use URL shortereners should we look at branded URL-shorteners to provide link context? Thanks.
Social Media | | Urbanfox0