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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Is it possible for a twitter user to automate a response to a tweet that I marked as a favorite?
If favorited a tweet of someone I don't know very well and received a response within a few minutes of the tweet asking "where have you been and what are you up to". Seems general enough to be automated and not specific enough for me to think it was personally sent by the user. Thank you.
Social Media | | EmSt0 -
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 -
If you post on two Twitter accounts could be rated as duplicate content
I have a personal Twitter account which is building up, but I also have a Twitter account for my holiday letting agency and until now I’ve always separated the subject of the tweets and links to my websites but I’m using Buffer which automates your tweets in advance and so I included some of the links to my business holiday letting agency articles on my personal account and people seem to like them and have shared them, but is there any risks to doing that regarding duplicate type of content? At the end of the day some the people on my personal Twitter will be interested in my agency tweets about holiday accommodation, I just want to do anything which could be termed spam.
Social Media | | persuaders0 -
How do I maximize my Twitter account for SEO?
What should I be doing to maximize my Twitter account to contribute to the SEO of my website? I have 30,000 followers and want to get some SEO out of Twitter.
Social Media | | bigeyecreative0 -
SEO with facebook and twitter
Hi all, It's become more apparent to us all going forward after the panda update that social signals are becoming more and more important in regards to SERPS. Our website is www.capitalalist.com and is gaining a decent amount of traffic from Twitter. www.capitalalist.com/twitter and we have managed to work out what works for us on twitter and what doesnt allowing us to interact with our followers more and more. The problem is facebook. Direct marketing doesn't work here. Our page is www.facebook.com/capitalalist but we are struggling to get any traffic or interaction with our friends. Any advice on how to market properly for facebook for seo purposes? Thanks in advance.
Social Media | | AdenBrands0 -
Buying Twitter/Facebook Followers
So i have a client that sends me a link once a week about buying followers for social media profiles. Each time i tell him if it seems to good to be true... then its too good to be true! What are your guys thoughts, experiences, feelings? Here are a few examples: http://www.targetedtraffic.int.tc http://www.fbfandamonium.com
Social Media | | kchandler0 -
Tool/Method to find users on Twitter from a CSV file
I'm attempting to find users to follow and receive reciprocal follows for a client on twitter. Through the company's newsletter database, I have a CSV file of somewhere in the range of 20,000 email addresses and names. I've been importing them 250 at a time into an empty Gmail account then connecting that with twitter each time to find some of them. However, a lot of the PEOPLE using the email addresses on the mailing list are not on twitter but their COMPANY is. To find the company, I can obviously drop the name@ part of the email and just search by the domain but this becomes tedious real quick since it has to be one by one and cannot be bulk imported/searched. Are there any tools/ideas out there to more easily find twitter users based on a larger set of keywords and/or domain names?
Social Media | | Motava0 -
Permanent URLs for Twitter?
Hi everyone - The site I am working on is going to start giving users the option to tweet that they completed an action. It reads, for example, "I just took the first step to ( ) with (site): (shortened link) via (Twitter name)" Here's my question: Should I worry about the fact that the shortened URL (we're possibly going to use Twitter's shortener T.Co, but I'm not dedicated to it) changes each time? Should we instead have a permanent short URL for the homepage (where we are going to direct people who click the link in the tweet)? Thanks!
Social Media | | JohnECF0