Twitter has announced new limits on how users and applications can automate their tweets, in order to fight spam and political propaganda bots.
Developers are now banned from using any system that simultaneously posts “identical or substantially similar” tweets from multiple accounts at once, or makes actions such as liking, retweeting and following across multiple accounts at once. Twitter has already removed this functionality from its own TweetDeck app, but third-party developers will have until March 23rd to comply.
So this is probably a little bit of both good and bad news for marketers.
Bad News
The first major change and the bad news for marketers is scheduling or posting one tweet in particular across multiple accounts at the same time. This means schedulers like Buffer, HubSpot and even our own Quuu scheduler, will need to make changes to how users add to their schedules.
This would stop a company like TechCrunch scheduling the same tweet across all their company accounts at the same time. They would need to create an entirely different tweet for each share. The only exceptions are verified applications that relate to world events or weather warnings etc.
Updated: 22 March 2018
The second major change is not allowing apps like Quuu to automatically add suggestions to your schedule. To facilitate this change, we are switching off the automated side to our offering and now all content suggestions will appear in your content library each day for you to add yourself, then as an additional change, you’ll need to update the share text we suggest to something different. This ensures no one is sharing the same text who uses Quuu.
To make adding suggestions to your scheduler easier, we are building mobile apps for iPhone and Android that will allow you to manage your schedule on the move.
Alongside our daily suggestions, you’ll also have access to all the content you’ve previously shared so filling your schedule will still be super fast and efficient. You’ll just need to update the text to say something different each time which isn’t too much trouble.
If you are still using Buffer/Hubspot + Quuu we will update you on this scenario shortly.
Good News
The good news is, these changes will ensure trending topics aren’t manipulated in any way, we’ll all stop receiving so many spammy “Thanks for following me” tweets, and, one hopes, people won’t be swayed to make certain political decisions because of bots and fake news.
It really shouldn’t be an issue for most marketers. They might manage multiple accounts under a single brand, but diversifying the content shared on each one does provide a better experience for followers. So these changes should only help them create more engaging and relevant content, especially since followers might be following these accounts to receive different types of information from each one.
So where does automation stand now?
You’ll still be able to use scheduling tools (phew) via GIPHY but now you’ll need to manage each profile individually, ensuring you don’t send the same tweets at the same time, across multiple profiles you manage. The Quuu Scheduler will help in this respect by blocking posts that are the same across multiple profiles and planned to go out at the same time. As a responsible Twitter user, you’ll need to make sure you don’t send similar tweets to multiple accounts at the same time, otherwise, your account may be flagged and deleted.
Ultimately, and this is something we’ve always said at Quuu, you should be responsible with automation and make sure ‘you are you’ sometimes on Twitter. Engage with others, and like things for yourself.
Use Quuu content only as a way to start conversions with others, start customising the share text yourselves before posting, maybe even ask questions relating to the article to generate discussion and more engagement.
Be human, be you, but still use Quuu 😉
Thanks for reading, how do you think it will affect you and your business?
@Quuu:disqus Could you help clarify how Quuu is addressing this? Isn’t Quuu’s model all about offering content that people will simply have tweeted out on their account? So you’re essentially tweeting the same identical tweet out on multiple accounts. Isn’t THAT part of what they are trying to stop? Or you are moving to adding “RT” to all tweets so it looks like a retweet vs identical original tweets?
I believe from a user perspective. The rules would stop a person submitting exactly the same content at the same time across multiple accounts.
In terms of what Quuu will do from an app perspective, we will take measures to ensure our users can’t tweet the same thing to multiple accounts at the same time by removing the option to select more than one account, and checking for duplicates and blocking tweets scheduled for the same time.
Quuu is a content curation tool, so it’s still ultimately down to the user to be responsible with automation. We would suggest making changes to share text we provide to put your own voice on things you share.
Hopefully this change will be better for all.