Twitter's New Rules on Automation and What It Means For Users

Twitter has released new rules which will definitely affect the time marketers spend on social media. To sum it up, Twitter users cannot:

1) Post duplicate tweets with multiple accounts.
2) Post duplicate or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account, or create duplicate or substantially similar accounts.

Which basically means you cannot leave automated posts to run for long periods of time without changing content, and you cannot use the same post and tweet it from different accounts you own.




THE CURRENT SITUATION

Marketers use post automation to keep their content in front of their target market at all times. A crucial part of effective advertising. This includes authors, bloggers and small businesses. 

But if you noticed, (and I'm sure Twitter has too), the number of "marketers" have exponentially increased. Businesses offering Twitter advertising are a dime a dozen and the indie publishing industry has it's fair share. Without a marketing agency behind them, authors need to be on social media, advertising their books.

With this need, "marketers" have responded by creating several Twitter accounts, buying followers by the hundreds of thousands and selling their services to authors.

And then, they use social media management platforms to automate their posts across their accounts.

But marketing services are not the only ones who use post automation. Many authors do. One can't simply be on social media all the time, tweeting their books.

I use Status Brew to automate posts about my books, my services, and my client's books. It has saved me a lot of time, and I can do other things while keeping my content and ads in front of people. On Status Brew, I simply create post recyclers, add my tweets, and they are posted on the schedule I set. I tweak the content periodically, update images, add new posts to my recyclers and leave it to do its job.




It's a godsend to marketers. When I'm on social media, I can concentrate on networking and sharing other posts.

But admittedly, looking at it from Twitter's perspective, there are a lot of duplicate content nowadays. And Twitter wants its platform to be a source of diverse and interesting content.


WHY IS TWITTER POST AUTOMATION CRUCIAL TO BUSINESSES?

Those who say that there's such a thing as over tweeting have no idea what they're talking about. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is fast. The life of a tweet is 30 minutes at best. After that, it gets buried in hundreds of tweets. You only get spammed on Twitter if you have few followers, cause then you'd see their posts all the time. But if you have tens of thousands of followers, it would be impossible to see all your follower's tweets.

So, if you only post once a day, it would not have that much of an impact on your marketing. Not if you're after branding. Not if you want book exposure. That is why social media management platforms like Status Brew and Hootsuite exist.

THE RESPONSE OF STATUS BREW

These platforms need to stay in business, but they must also strictly adhere to the social media platform's rules. They certainly don't want the people using their platforms to get banned while using their services. So from their side, they make sure that users follow the rules.

Status Brew has responded to the new Twitter rules by sunsetting its post recyclers, starting on April 2. A move that almost made me throw my laptop out the window when I first read it. I thought, "There goes 2 hours of my time daily." But, it must do that, because Status Brew cannot be sure that their users will ALL be responsible enough to adhere to Twitter's anti-duplication rule. It is, in a way, saving us from ourselves.

However, to still meet its customer's needs, they are coming up with alternatives that will still allow Status Brew users to automate, but also require them to update their posts periodically. With Status Brew's stellar support team, I'm sure they will come up with an alternative solution. I've never seen a more active (and nicer) support team anywhere.

I must believe they will find a way, and give their new solutions a chance before I cancel my subscription --- before I return to Hootsuite in defeat and schedule posts daily. I'm not looking forward to that. I'm a publicist with hundreds of posts and I MUST be visible at all times.

WHAT DOES THE NEW TWITTER RULE MEAN FOR TWEEPS?

It simply means we must come up with fresh content and new ways to present old content.

This is not a challenge for writers who are wordsmiths. The challenge is finding the time to do all this.

What we can do is sit down and write different tweets as drafts and use them to diversify our tweets. If you are promoting a book for example, you can use reviews or book snippets and tweet these. The idea is to keep the texts of your tweets different from the previous ones. FRESH CONTENT.

Keep in mind that bots are monitoring the tweets. It has its own parameters to check if the tweets are duplicates or "related." It's not the duplicates I'm worried about. Change a word and it's no longer a duplicate. But what does "related" and "substantially similar" content mean? This worries me. A lot. Does this mean we can't tweet about one product several times? With the same link?

It's too early to say at this point. We'll just have to wait and see how this issue evolves.

Let me know what YOU think about this development.



1 comment:

  1. Hi, Eeva and thank you laying this all out so concisely for your readers. As I do all my own marketing (Outside of New Release and cover reveal Promo's) this is the point I find most worrying ...

    "Keep in mind that bots are monitoring the tweets. It has its own parameters to check if the tweets are duplicates or "related." It's not the duplicates I'm worried about. Change a word and it's no longer a duplicate. But what does "related" and "substantially similar" content mean? This worries me. A lot. Does this mean we can't tweet about one product several times? With the same link?"

    My worst nightmare. I'll be watching for more updates. Thanks again.

    ReplyDelete

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