Don’t Panic – Here’s the Lowdown!
In February 2018 Twitter announced changes they would be making, which would directly affect the way you schedule and create tweets for your business, charity, blog, etc. These rules come into effect from 23rd March and have caused quite a stir about what exactly you should and shouldn’t be doing. I have been researching and gathering info around the changes and as I understand it in a nutshell the new rules are:
- You can no longer post the same tweet across multiple accounts.
- You should no longer re purpose the exact same, or similar tweet and reschedule multiple times (otherwise known as evergreen), as in ever not just wait 24 hours!
- The above rules apply to scheduled/queued tweets, as well as live tweeting.
But why?
Well basically Twitter are attempting to crack down on “malicious activity” that has been happening of late. Banning multiple tweets from one account is designed to prevent bots from spreading spam and taking over conversations and trending hashtags. You may have noticed lately that overnight your followers seem to increase rapidly and the next they all disappear again? This is Twitter deleting accounts they deem are bots or spammers, so it’s not really a huge surprise that the next step was this change.
What do I do now?
Twitter’s recommends that if you wish to share the same post on multiple profiles or repeat on just one profile, you should simply retweet the original post. However, please note that Twitter is now preventing tools from allowing likes and retweets from multiple profiles simultaneously, so if you are using a tool such as TweetDeck to automate retweeting you will notice this option will soon not be available.
All good scheduling tools are making changes to make this activity as easy as possible for you. For example I personally use the tool SmarterQueue, who will be doing the following:
“From March 23rd SmarterQueue will be introducing an updated version of Evergreen Recycling to comply with Twitter’s new policies.
From your perspective, Evergreen Recycling will continue to work as it always has done: what changes is the smart stuff we do for you.
We’ll be checking each tweet before it is published, to find out whether it’s been sent on any of your Twitter profiles already (profiles connected within your SmarterQueue account). If it is a duplicate, we will retweet the original post instead of sending a new tweet. This will have the effect of bumping the tweet to the top of your feed, and showing it to your followers again.”
That solves the issue of retweeting an original tweet, but what if you would like your recycled tweet to be published as a new tweet not retweeted? Well essentially you will need to change the text and any images to effectively create a new ‘unique’ tweet. Now how ‘changed’ the tweet needs to be is yet to be understood but if in any doubt be cautious and change more than you think is necessary – better that way than risking a suspension on your account! I will keep you updated once new features have been announced but once again SmarterQueue are adding features to help with this:
“If you are creating a new tweet for multiple profiles, you should take advantage of our feature that allows you to customise the text for each profile, and make sure the tweets are substantially different from profile to profile.
We will also be releasing a new feature in the coming weeks, that will allow you to create multiple text and image variations for a post, so that each time the post is recycled, it will use a different version of your text and/or a different image. This will work for all social platforms, and will mean you can split-test different content, to see which gets the most engagement.”
What are the downsides to these changes?
For me the main downsides are time and analysis. Creating new tweets all the time is bound to be more time consuming, however if you take this into account with your content strategy and use features in scheduling tool like the one spoken about above you should be fine. You may just need to post slightly less per day but make sure they are really great relevant tweets. Plus keep engagement high and you will still see great success.
The one aspect I haven’t yet seen any fixes on (please someone get in touch if you have) is the analysis of individual tweets. Each tweet will now be seen as unique so to see the success of one topic you would need to find the multiple unique tweets you had to create.
But overall I see this as a good thing!
Yep, no panic over in this camp! I personally see these changes as a positive thing. I am fed up of seeing spam across social media and newsfeeds being filled with posts blatantly from bots. I think people should be creating great content strategies that engage and inform their audience and stop focusing on vanity numbers and start building quality relationships with your audience. I truly believe it’ll stand you in much better stead as a business!
Over the coming weeks I will be using and feeding back on all the feature changes that SmarterQueue will be implementing and also giving advice on tips on content strategies and how to create great content – it’s my big love and to be great in social media it should be yours to!!
Now the great people at SmarterQueue have given me this link ?? https://smarterqueue.com/?ref=8fu which will increase your 14 day FREE trial to a 30 DAY FREE TRIAL!!