Keeping Twitter safe and free from spam is a top priority for us. — Yoel Roth, API Policy and Product Trust at Twitter
This year, the team at Twitter has taken additional action to keep Twitter free from spam. Specifically, they have introduced new rules around automation and the use of multiple accounts.
You might be wondering, “why is this important to me?”
In short, Twitter might suspend your account if you fail to comply.
These rules are also encouraging good sharing practices on Twitter and will benefit everyone in the long run.
And since this is such an important topic, we would love to explore it together with you. In this blog post, we’ll share the rationale behind the new rules and what the rules would mean to you — as a Twitter user and a Buffer customer.
It’ll be great to hear your thoughts in the comments section below, too.
Why did Twitter introduce these new rules?
First, let’s understand the rationale behind these rules.
Spam has been an issue on Twitter for a long time and you might recognize these two common types of spam:
- A single account posting identical (or almost identical) tweets
- Multiple accounts posting identical (or almost identical) tweets
Such tweets often don’t provide the best experience to Twitter users, especially since Twitter still show most tweets in the reverse-chronological order. Such aggressive spam from others can prevent your followers from seeing your thoughtfully-created tweets.
That’s why the team at Twitter wants to tackle them with the new rules.
As you’ll find out below, the new rules may create some extra steps for you as a social media manager — regardless of whether you use automation or not. But overall, we feel that these changes will benefit Twitter as a whole and benefit you as a marketer.
What are the new Twitter rules (and what do they mean to you)?
Yoel Roth, who works on API Policy and Product Trust at Twitter, published a blog post about the new rules. The blog post, however, is targeted more at developers than marketers. Hence, we would love to share what the new rules mean to you.
The easiest way to understand the rules is this:
The Twitter Rules prohibit posting duplicative or substantially similar content — both on one account and across multiple accounts.
Let’s break that down further. Here are the four key areas:
- Posting to multiple accounts
- Posting multiple similar tweets
- Posting multiple tweets to a trending topic
- Simultaneously perform actions such as Likes, Retweets, or follows from multiple accounts
1. Posting to multiple accounts
Posting duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts you control, or creating duplicate or substantially similar accounts, with or without the use of automation, is never allowed.
What it means to social media managers
There are three key takeaways from this guideline:
- You cannot post identical (or even almost identical) content to multiple accounts.
- You cannot create multiple accounts that are very similar to one another.
- The above applies to you whether you use an automation tool (which includes scheduling) or you manually post your tweets.
Here’s an example of what’s not allowed:
If you have multiple distinct accounts, which you wish to post the same content to, Twitter recommends that you retweet the content from one account using the remaining accounts (like Brian did in the below example).
Be aware, however, that “bulk, aggressive, or very high-volume automated Retweeting is not permitted”. In other words, retweeting from a few accounts is fine….
