What You Can Learn from Twitter's Mass Account Suspension

Recently, Twitter had a full-blown implosion. Word out of the Twitter camp is that there was a "spamcloud' (whatever that means). In response, Twitter suspended many thousands of accounts of innocent users.

It goes without saying that this is very poor policy on Twitter's part, and the kind of thing that could kill the app. It won't be long before the next big thing hits the Internet, and if Twitter isn't careful, it will bleed users and turn into the next MySpace (a once dominant player that is now struggling).

This whole messy situation places emphasis on an important rule of Internet marketing:

Concentrate your efforts promoting Internet properties that you own.

Twitter owns your Twitter account. You don't control your Facebook account. Your LinkedIn account belongs to LinkedIn. If any of those sites decide they don't like what are you doing, they can lock you out.

A simple solution is to point your own custom domain names to your social media pages. For instance, if you have a Facebook Pages page, then you could register a domain name that point to that page. 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.

Here is an hypothetical example:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/somewords#/pages/MoreWords/83425934948

Custom URL: SomeDomainName.com

The above example also highlights another benefit, which is that a custom URL is much easier to remember.

The concept described above is applicable to any social media web site, not just Facebook. With regard to Twitter specifically, there actually is an SEO benefit to using your default Twitter page name if the URL contains keywords. But that is just fine! You can still use a custom domain name, set as a permanent redirect, but let Google find the page with its default Twitter name.

So be proactive. Don't let your social media sites own you. Concentrate your marketing efforts on promoting domain names that you control. Maybe the next time Twitter or another social media platforms goes down, you can exercise control over the situation, rather than waiting and hoping that it gets fixed.

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