Regular readers may recall an article I wrote earlier this month about the Twitter.co.uk domain, which after many years of belong to someone else appeared to have been acquired by Twitter.

Ahead of publishing this piece I reached out to Steve Crawford, the previous owner of Twitter.co.uk, and Twitter themselves for clarification. I emailed various contacts at Twitter, Twitter’s PR team, and Twitter support.

Crawford was courteous enough to come back almost straight away.
Twitter never responded at all. Until now.

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Three weeks. Three weeks to respond to a request for help – and then they send an automated response.

Okay, you could argue that the support team aren’t probably best placed to answer my query, but I was careful to pick the best subject for my enquiry and all somebody had to do was forward it on. Yes, I know they’re probably as far away from inbox zero as you could possibly be – so why not quit doing a lousy job, and just hire more people?

This isn’t an isolated incident – users complain about Twitter’s lousy support network pretty much constantly. Almost two years ago, a poll I conducted revealed that 81% of readers rated Twitter’s support as somewhere between below average and terrible. I’d be amazed if that number has come down at all.

And we wonder why the platform has such a high drop-out rate for newcomers?