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
-
Twitter Analytics
We are looking for top engagers for one of our clients - anyone know of any good resources besides twitter analytics and followerwonk?
Social Media | | CGR-Creative0 -
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 -
Add Tracking Parameters to Website Links on Facebook/Twitter
does anyone know of a way to add tracking parameters to facebook/twitter website links in the about us section so that we can understand what traffic is specifically coming from that page? I already add tracking to posts, but I am more trying to track each standard link on these social channels. I am currently running into character limits or the result looks like a long url that will most certainly deter clicks because it looks suspicious.
Social Media | | dsinger1 -
Twitter account that copies all your tweets
Hello I have this twitter account https://twitter.com/sabiastuque_ about curiosities and there is another twitter account https://twitter.com/sabiasundato_o that copies every single tweet i do at the moment. It is no tweet i made than they do not copy, i think there is something doing it because i think they dont even read them. They just dont copy the tweets that as mentions or link. It seems so like a machine!!! And after all of that they have 1,5 millon followers by copying everything from me and i have 1 millón Should i report that? How are they doing it? Is there any mirror or something?
Social Media | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Twitter Stats
Anyone know of a service where I can insert a list of URLs (or twitter user names) and get twitter stats for each account? Thanks in advance. Justin
Social Media | | GrouchyKids0 -
Twitter and SEO
Hello Mozzers, I am trying to determine the effectiveness of using twitter as an SEO tactic. A site in my niche (healthcare job boards) is ranking very well for a handful of head terms. Their backlink profile is okay, but not amazing. But one thing that stands out to me is their approach to twitter, http://www.physemp.com/socialTwitter.html. It looks like they send an automated feed of their jobs to these specific twitter handles. Each of the handles has over 2,000 followers (some are legit some are bots). The site ranks for some highly competitive head terms (see attached). Can any of their ranking success be attributed to these various twitter handles? Is Google seeing these twitter feeds and associating high follower count and high tweet frequency with the URL attached to each account? Has anyone else experienced anything similar? Thanks in advanced! lMbkS
Social Media | | CJSmiles0 -
Do links in Paper.li twitter round-ups help my SEO?
My twitter feed is picked up in the daily roundups like Paper.li. Do these links count towards my SEO effort or are they just empty. Clearly they spread my content so that great, just wondered if the links pass juice to the site.
Social Media | | GlobalLingo0