How To Tweet To Lots of People And Not Get Suspended

If you tweet to people that don’t follow you, and they decide to mark you as spam, your Twitter account could be suspended for “sending multiple unsolicited mentions to other users.”

In this post I’m going to tell you how you can talk to lots of folks on Twitter and avoid being suspended for multiple unsolicited mentions.

But: this doesn’t protect you if you violate the Twitter rules, break the following best practices, or go against Twitter’s automation rules. Tweet smarter, people! If you don’t know the rules and best practices click and read the links earlier in this paragraph.

First, Understand How Twitter is Trying To Protect Us From Spammers

It’s simple really: Twitter is trying to protect us from strangers sending us tweets we don’t want. And who are strangers? They are people we have no relationship with.

So ask yourself: On Twitter, how can you tell two people have a relationship? Any one of these ways count:

We’ve been faving or retweeting each others’ tweets, or adding each other to Twitter lists;
We follow each other;
We’ve had past conversations;
You’re current tweet is a reply to a tweet from me.

The Secret

I’m amazed that more people don’t see the obvious that is staring them in the face. I get questions all the time from businesses saying “I want to sell things to people in my tweets, but they mark me as spam and I get suspended. What can I do?”

If you’re one of those people who think it’s not efficient to spend time with people before trying to sell them something, even though you should go home and re-think your life (see video below), I’m going to help you with an efficient solution to your problem.

While I’m going to give a very quick process, hopefully I’ll actually be able to convert you to building relationships instead of just trying to trick people into accepting spam from you.

35 Extra Seconds Starts A Relationships

Here’s the minimum you should do before sending someone a sales tweet. First, have Twitter advanced search and Favstar.fm open to speed things up.

Use Twitter advanced search to find tweets from people that might be interested in your product or service. This you would have to do anyway, so I’m not counting this against your extra time investment ;-)

5 Seconds: Click to open their bio and review quickly. If they seem unsuitable, skip them. If there is a link in their bio that seems interesting, click and check it out. (Not strictly necessary, but I always do this when I meet someone new.)
5 Seconds: Use the steps in http://bit.ly/LinkToATweet to go to the page for the tweet that shows their interest. Bookmark it (use Ctrl-D for speed) so you can come back to it later.
5 Seconds: Follow them and add them to a Twitter list (here’s how to do that) called “Interesting People.” Yes, you could call it “prospects” or whatever makes sense for you, and make it a private Twitter list, but the public list approach is better.
10 Seconds: Copy their username, Go to Favstar.fm, click the “Choose User” link at the top, paste in their username, and press enter.
10 Seconds: You are now looking at that user’s most popular tweets. Do one or more of the following steps: Fav one or more that you like. If you really like one, retweet it. Finally, consider replying to any of their tweets. (You might want to also review their most recent tweets on Twitter.)

Wait at least a few hours (days are better) to see who tweets to you. Some will thank you for the fav or RT or follow. Next, go back through the tweets you bookmarked in your browser. They will indicate who has followed you back. Tweet your friendly, helpful carefully worded sales pitch to the ones that tweeted you, or followed you back. (I’m not counting this against your time investment because you would have done that anyway.)

A Better Way

Hopefully by following this process you’ll have found some interesting people that you really want to connect with, and will have actually spent more time with them, such as by reading their recent tweets, and reviewing their blog or website and commenting on it.

Spending time creating relationships with people that are interesting to you will make you much, much more successful than any other approach on social media. That’s why we call it social media.

Even better is to create some educational articles and videos that can help people who are looking for a product or service like yours. Then when you find someone in the market for what you offer, instead of sending them a sales pitch, tweet them a helpful comment and a link to your relevant educational information.

Summary

I wrote this so I would have a reply to people who just want to send spam without being suspended. If you’re one of those people, I hope you are considering spending more than just a few seconds building relationships with people. If you want to be really successful on social media, learn how to become popular with influential users.

If you’re like me, and not just looking for a more efficient way to spam people, we both know that you don’t build real relationships in just a few seconds, but I hope you will have found some tips to get your new connections on Twitter off to a faster start!