Image by Titanas via Flickr

For the last month I’ve been meaning to write a post about the “fragile state” of building your social network following, but Sunday night brought it into acute focus. I became a living example of what can happen with human error and not having ownership of a social network can potentially do to you and your business building activities.

July 5th was a beautiful Sunday here in Seattle. Enjoying the Independence Day holiday weekend with my wife. We just got home from a tasty lunch eating some freshly caught crab. Walked through my organic garden beds to check on how our 9 different types of tomato plants were doing in the 90 degree weather. Life was good…until I sat down and checked my Twitter profile, @TimothyCarter.

I found a not so cool pink box above my Twitter stream saying my account had been suspended and was being investigated for strange activity! Whaaattt?

Apparently while I was gone, Twitter had experienced a massive spammer attack which then resulted in their system suspending hundreds, if not thousands of legitimate tweeters like myself and my buddy Mari Smith. Mari shared her experience in her post, Lessons Learned From Temporary Twitter Suspension.

Since January 2008, I have been an active member of Twitter and have organically growing a following of active tweeters that have now exceeded 17,000 super cool people! I was in shock to find my account to be locked. So I hopped over to my 2nd favorite social networking site, Facebook to see what was going on and learned I was one of growing group of people in the same situation. Conversations on my wall & Mari Smith’s wall was filled with confusion and frustration about what was going on. That got me back to Twitter to start tweeting from another Twitter profile I keep to retain my name on Twitter: @TimCarter about it.

Next thing you know, Mashable has posted about the Twitter account suspension confusion.

A couple hours later, Twitter let everyone know via their status.twitter.com blog that the mass of mistakenly suspended Twitter accounts was due to a human error. Not only was it human error but it was a newbie at Twitter who had the power to screw up a lot of people’s accounts! WOW!

Twitter right now is a HOT place to network online. But it is just one place and one piece to your social media marketing success. It’s important to have a personal presence on Facebook, have a complete and fully functioning Facebook fanpage. Don’t forget you should be active on places like LinkedIn and if you’re doing videos, YouTube as well. You need to be well rounded in your social networking activities and visibile where people are.

Now here is the point of what I teach people who are building their business via social media networking. You have NO CONTROL over your Twitter account, your Facebook profile or wherever you spend quality time building a presence in the myriad of social networking sites. At a whim, or accidental button click, your account can be deleted or suspended. You lose EVERYTHING you’ve built at those communities.

Yes, you need to focus on building your “brand” in these social networking communities & connect with individuals there…BUT, your long term focus and the goal of social networking is to bring people to your social media hub…your blog/website. Your social media home should be where you keep your growing list of raving fans…your social media tribe should be growing there. They should be subscribing to your RSS feed, subscribing to your email list…it is where you have control!

So if you’ve been too focused on building your Twitter following number or trying to max out your 5000 friends on Facebook, you need to change that focus. You never know when the moment can happen where you completely lose your presence on these social networking sites.

What would you do if you did lose your Twitter or Facebook account? Would your business be crippled? How long would it take to rebuild it all over again? Just something to think about.

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