Shadow Ban Lifted by Twitter: What Worked For Me!

A friend told me I was shadow banned by twitter. What does that mean? It means if someone searches a hashtag that you have used, they will not find your tweet unless they add your twitter handle. This is rough for those of us working twitter parties. And if you search the hashtag while you are also signed into your account, you will come up: you have to either sign out of twitter and check, or use this ShadowBan Test link! The response that you want to see is that at least one tweet was found, and even though it says you might not be shadow banned, if it says one tweet has been found, then you are good.

I asked my blogger friends all over Facebook, what do I do? No one had a real answer, so I am just going to tell you what I did. I stopped my massive retweeting for five days in case that looked like spam. I went into my twitter account and disabled/revoked access to as many apps as possible that I could afford to not use for awhile. You do this by going to your profile on twitter, then Settings and Privacy, and then on the left side menu choose “Apps.” Revoke as many as you can to see if that makes a difference, I suspect you will see a lot of things that you forgot you gave access to, and do not need there!

I also started tweeting organically. I suppose that is something we should all be doing anyway, and now I see that it is important, because in this process, instead of losing followers, I have been gaining some! I will take that added benefit! I started tweeting about my day, my life, pictures of me at the gym, anything that was at least a tiny bit interesting. I also started to respond to other folks tweets with nice remarks. That is called interacting with people. What a wild concept!

I also placed a twitter ad and tried to get help from those folks through their DM system. Rumor has it that that used to help. Not any more, they would not help, they have caught on to us. Then this morning, after my money was spent, I DM’d them that I wanted to place a bigger ad but my client was not seeing my hashtag. The story is, money talks, so that may have been what turned the tide for me and gotten action. I will never know for sure because no one at twitter will help us! I am not suggesting you spend money on twiter ads, I am just sharing what I did and what may have helped to get my shadow ban lifted. You might DM twitter ads and say that you want to place an ad but your client could not see your hashtag use at the event you attended.

Then I applied to be twitter verified. I have not heard back yet, but that is another thing that may have helped, again, I do not know what of all the actions I took, helped.

Lastly, I DM’d twitter support and eventually sent them screen shots, but I waited two days after they requested them. Either way, they were no help so far a I can tell.

So, after five or more days of the twitter ban, I am OK for now. I cannot tell you for sure if any of the above made a difference, or if all of the above make a difference, I can only share what I did and what the outcome was. And that I was extremely frustrated!

P.S. I purposely did not use a capital T for twitter!