Why Does Twitter Keep Ignoring Me?

By Colleen Walsh Fong

What hashtag would you use to describe your Tweeting experience? Mine would be #humanplease.

Twitter keeps ignoring me. I don’t care for the tool that much to begin with. It seems like a huge time suck. So it really bugs me when it doesn’t have the courtesy to answer me. I know how to set up an account and use it. I’ve set up several functioning accounts for clients to help them brand their businesses. And I grew my cookbook Twitter account from 7 followers to over 600 in 3 weeks with just one tweet a day.

I’ve got another account for my freelance writing business. If you’re into tweeting follow me @CopyWritesCW. I promise I won’t overwhelm you with tweets. Mainly because I don’t make many. But once in a while you’ll see something from me and you might find it useful or at least entertaining. And I hope you’ll retweet it because it wasn’t easy getting this account to work.

When I set up this Twitter account I tweeted a couple of things and saved my login information in a safe place. Then I got busy doing lots of other fun things like writing a book about how to write to grow your business and writing a bunch of interesting things for my clients. So I didn’t have time to tweet from that account, and I didn’t want to clog up your twitter feed with dumb stuff.

But when I had something good to say Twitter wouldn’t let me into my new account. I knew all of my login info was correct. But Twitter insisted on defaulting to my original Twitter account for my cookbooks.

I logged out of the cookbook account. And I logged into the @CopyWritesCW account again. Twitter sent me back to the cookbook one. Again. After trying all kinds of different tricks to get Twitter to notice my new account, I tried to get into it by using the Twitter help function. Here I have to say that for a communication medium, Twitter is really light on the response end.

Way at the bottom of the left panel of the Notifications page, in really light gray font, I found some linked options all bunched together like this:

© 2015 Twitter About Help Terms Privacy

Cookies Ads info Brand Blog Status Apps

Jobs Advertise Businesses Media

Developers Cricket

I clicked “Help” and arrived at its help forums, which is a fancy way of saying a big huge page full of linked words I had to wade through to find the one that seemed to fit my problem.

If you’ve ever used one of these help forums–and unless you just traveled from the 18th century through Outlander’s stones at Craigh na Dun you surely have–you know that clicking on your topic will take you to another screen with more options, and then a third one, and then a fourth. Of course sometimes you find your answer, but in the immortal words of Mick and Keith, “you can’t always get what you want.”

And I didn’t. I found a place to reset my password and the following message appeared on my screen:

“Please check your email inbox for an email from Twitter Support. If you don’t see one, try checking your email’s spam and trash folders.”

I waited and the email never arrived in any of my email folders. So I tried again and got the same results. And again, the email never arrived.

So I googled around and put the word out on Facebook that I was having trouble and a friend sent me a message with the following link:

“Twitter customer service phone numbers and support

www.contacthelp.com”

I was surprised and thrilled to find a phone number on the other side of that link and I called it immediately, which, naturally, took me to a phone tree of options. I selected the “support” option and got the following outgoing message:

“Unfortunately twitter does not provide user support over the telephone. To find information and answers for your questions please visit support.twitter.com. If you’re unable to find what you’re looking for our help center provides information about contacting our team via email.”

By this point I was ready to give up, but I estimated I’d invested a couple of hours in this endeavor, not including the setting up of the account to begin with. So I pushed on and got to the place where I could send an email about my problem. As soon as I hit send this message appeared on my screen:

“Your request has been submitted to Twitter. We are usually able to respond within a few days, but some issues may take longer.”

One week later I am still waiting to receive an answer and I have accepted that like the other promised emails it will never come. I’m picturing one overwhelmed person, making $4.00 per hour, frantically sifting through a mountain of Twitter help requests over in Manila. That lone support person can’t possibly respond to everyone. Let’s face it. If we need help from any of these big social media entities we’re on our own.

I eventually found a way into my Twitter account using my phone and have tweeted out a couple of things since then.

My next tweet is going to be: “#customernoservice #helpneeded #humanplease follow me and retweet if you’re ever frustrated by twitter!”

If you find that tweet in your Twitter feed, please help me out and act on it because I’ve put a lot of effort into being able to tweet it.

Colleen produces custom copywriting and content for branding businesses of all sizes.