How Twitter’s Automation Updates May Affect You
I’m sure you’ve all heard about the alleged role that social media platforms have played in disrupting recent elections in the US and UK (Brexit). Facebook, Twitter and others have come under much scrutiny as more of the disruptive mechanisms have been uncovered. In response, these social networks are making changes that hopefully will help to curb or eliminate the ability for hackers, spammers and otherwise evil people to negatively impact such important aspects of our democracies.
In late February, we received details regarding the specific changes that Twitter is undertaking to keep Twitter safe and spam free. They are essentially eliminating any sort of automated posting that can be set up through the use of multiple Twitter accounts and third-party apps that leverage Twitter’s developer API. These are the primary mechanisms used by people who wish to automate the dissemination of spam or harmful content.
As a result of these changes, social publishing platforms that offer certain automation features will have to make changes as well. DivvyHQ is one of them and we have various updates in the works to comply. More details on this will come soon, but as of Friday, March 23rd, 2018, when Twitter’s changes are officially released, we want you to be aware of how their changes may affect you and your team.
Change #1: You will not be able to simultaneously post identical or substantially similar content to multiple accounts.
For example, most social media management platforms have historically allowed users to simultaneously post a single tweet to multiple Twitter accounts that the user controls. Starting on 3/23/18, this action will no longer be allowed and doing this will cause the tweets to be blocked (not published). So, please be aware of this and only post tweets to one Twitter account at a time. Alternatively, Twitter suggests that “you can Retweet content from one account from the other accounts you wish to share that post from.”
Change #2: You will not be able to post identical or substantially similar tweets to a single Twitter account.
For example, you may create a single social post to promote a blog post on Twitter and use an automation tool (like Divvy’s scheduling functionality) to publish that same tweet several times over the course of several days. This will no longer be allowed. Individual tweets need to be substantially different in order to not get blocked. So, you need to get used to writing multiple variations of your tweets (already the best practice) when promoting your content or engaging your Twitter audience.
There are other changes outlined in Twitter’s announcement and we encourage you to dig in deeper if you currently use other social automation tools alongside DivvyHQ. The two changes above are the two that directly affect our application, thus we wanted to bring these to your attention and make you aware that we have updates in the works.
All-in-all, we feel that these changes are warranted and welcome as they largely pull the plug on spambots and fake accounts. A little short-term pain should have long-term gains for Twitter and our experience as Twitter users.
