Yesterday Twitter exploded, and not in a good way. In response to what Twitter described as a “spamcloud” (I think they just made that up), thousands of user accounts were suspended, including mine, and including my wife’s, who only has about a dozen very specific users she shares tweets with related to kidney reflux (the furthest thing from spam you can imagine).
This is certainly not the kind of policy that will endear newer Twitter users. I think Twitter needs to keep in mind that there will be competitors come along to try and knock it down, and this kind of policy is the kind of thing that will hasten its demise.
Here is an important rule of Internet marketing that this episode highlights:
You should spend your time and resources promoting properties that you control.
You don’t own your Twitter account. You don’t own your Facebook account. You don’t own your LinkedIn account. You are at the mercy of those sites to stay in business and keep your account live.
One solution to this situation is to register a custom domain name for all of your social media pages. If you have a Facebook page, register a domain name that points to it. Then, if your Facebook page goes down, you can repoint the domain name elsewhere. If you have promoted a particular domain, rather than the default page name, then you have control. Facebook owns you if you have spent all of your time promoting the default Facebook URL.
So take control! Don’t let your social media sites own you. Concentrate your marketing efforts on promoting domain names that you control. Then maybe you can avoid the next meltdown such as what happened with Twitter this weekend.