Lots of tweeting today regarding a post at Equimedia about how Twitter and digital marketing work well together and we certainly agree but, it’s not all paradise with this bird if your business runs into problems with tweeting.

We love Twitter, it’s a big part of what we do every day and we like to think we use it effectively to provide eMail marketers timely information and engage our community. However, we do have a bone to pick with this bird right now. Seeing as how they seem to be promoting themselves as a channel for business marketing and success, they shouldn’t be failing to support those same businesses and that’s how it looks to us as one of those businesses.

For some time we’ve been tweeting via the #emailjobs channel about great openings for eMail marketing professionals. We consider this an important part of how we serve the community here at The eMail Guide. About two weeks ago, Twitter essentially “turned off the tap” and our tweets about jobs stopped, leaving almost 700 followers of this feed in the lurch.

In researching their support page, we found out that automatic feeds might be dropped from search. In setting a feed up, we do understand that it requires tuning and monitoring to avoid spamming. We’ve tried to be very cognisant of this and only tweet once per hour with #eMailJobs and yet it appears we’ve been blocked.

The big issue is that we’ve tried to connect with them and resolve the problem and yet, they’ve completely ignored us. How is Twitter going to survive as a business tool if they continue to shut down the same business feeds they are supposed to support with no explanation or response to support requests?

We submitted two tickets on the issue. One simply vanished with no explanation from our history. The other was closed and marked “resolved” by their support people with absolutely no explanation as to why. Tweets to their support people were also enthusiastically ignored. We tried to email their press people (cuz we’re media ya know) and nada. We tried to call them and the one number we found has been disconnected while information for their area has no listing.

Support always costs and we get that but, if Twitter ever wants to monetize their service, they’ll need to at least offer some kind of premium support option to business. Look, if all you are tweeting about is the awesome mega-burrito you had for lunch, then you can probably wait a bit for a support issue to be addressed. You might even tolerate no response because the expectation of service is low. However, if you want  business to depend in part on your service, you have to at least offer the option of being able to pay for a level of support which can be relied on by those you wish to serve.

Have any experiences good or bad you want to share about Twitter support? Please feel free to post them.