Regaining Twitter

[RishadShaikh59]

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!

[EGOL]

this is a good idea 

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[Goetzman]

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?

[dgerecht]

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!

[KBolsinger]

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.

[KBolsinger]

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...

[Getz.pro]

easy, show them how many links came to the site via twitter over a month/year period. That should get a bosses attention.

[RishadShaikh59]

hmmm...if only I am able to convince the editorial!

[Getz.pro]

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.

[RishadShaikh59]

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!

[Dan-Petrovic]

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.

[ThomasHgenhaven]

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