How Twitter’s latest policy update to stop spam & malicious content is impacting brands

Social media mar­keters react to Twit­ter’s new rule restrict­ing simul­ta­ne­ous tweets with iden­ti­cal con­tent across mul­ti­ple accounts.

Last month, Twit­ter made a major announce­ment that left many social media man­agers mim­ic­k­ing the guy with blink­ing eyes GIF. In a move to com­bat the onslaught of spam and bot activ­i­ty, the site said it would no longer per­mit simul­ta­ne­ous tweets across mul­ti­ple accounts con­tain­ing iden­ti­cal content.

“One of the most com­mon spam vio­la­tions we see is the use of mul­ti­ple accounts on the Twit­ter devel­op­er plat­form to attempt to arti­fi­cial­ly ampli­fy or inflate the promi­nence of cer­tain Tweets,” wrote API pol­i­cy and prod­uct trust team mem­ber, Yoel Roth, on the Twit­ter blog.

Days after the site’s announce­ment, Twit­ter CEO Jack Dorsey said the main ques­tion his com­pa­ny is try­ing to answer right now is how it can mea­sure the health of the plat­form in a way that is pub­lic and accountable.

“The more clar­i­ty we can build, the more trust we’ll have,” said Dorsey dur­ing a livestream broad­cast, but many believe this lat­est move to curb mali­cious behav­ior is pun­ish­ing the wrong users.

Less automation means more time-intensive tasks for marketers

As the com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er for Con­nect­ed Nation, a non­prof­it aim­ing to expand access to high-speed inter­net across the US, Jes­si­ca Den­son was imme­di­ate­ly impact­ed by the change. In addi­tion to over­see­ing the Con­nect­ed Nation’s pri­ma­ry Twit­ter han­dle, she man­ages 10 oth­er com­pa­ny-relat­ed Twit­ter accounts.

“I’m most often shar­ing news sto­ries relat­ed to broad­band expan­sion, tele­work, and efforts to close the dig­i­tal divide,” says Den­son. “The con­tent is iden­ti­cal on the accounts sev­er­al times dai­ly because news on the sub­ject can impact all the states we serve and pro­vide solu­tions for those areas.”

With Twitter’s recent pol­i­cy updates, Den­son says her social media respon­si­bil­i­ties take a lot more time now.

“It means tak­ing the same post and repost­ing it each time — find­ing the image on my com­put­er each time. It sim­ply adds sev­er­al min­utes to every mes­sage I need out there, and when you’re doing five to 15 every day, that can eat up your time quickly.”

The companies that will be impacted most by Twitter’s update

Jim Ander­son, CEO for SocialFlow, a social media man­age­ment plat­form used by pub­lish­ers and media out­lets (Mar­ket­ing Land includ­ed), says Twitter’s new rules will most like­ly affect the teams man­ag­ing Twit­ter accounts for large media companies.

“It will have the great­est impact on nation­al media com­pa­nies that have dozens, or even hun­dreds of local media out­lets,” says Ander­son. “For exam­ple, a media com­pa­ny that owns radio, tele­vi­sion and news­pa­per out­lets in dozens of mar­kets might want to make a human inter­est or lifestyle post to dozens of those properties.”

SocialFlow client Apryl Pilol­li, who serves as the senior prod­uct man­ag­er for social at Cox Media, says Twitter’s lat­est update unfair­ly impacts brands.

“The fact that Twit­ter is penal­iz­ing every­one with this change is like a man­ag­er tak­ing away work-from-home priv­i­leges from the whole team because one per­son abus­es it. All brands shouldn’t be pun­ished for a few bad apples that are mis­us­ing the func­tion­al­i­ty,” says Pilolli.

Den­son agrees with Pilol­li. She believes Twit­ter and its users would be bet­ter served if the site took more time to review indi­vid­ual accounts.

“I think it would be more effec­tive if they vet­ted Twit­ter accounts rather than lim­it­ing how we can uti­lize our accounts. Twit­ter can be very effec­tive for non­prof­its try­ing to do good things — in our case to help ful­fill our mis­sion to close the dig­i­tal divide — IF we can lever­age it.”

What it means for marketers going forward

While the recent updates will make her job more chal­leng­ing, Den­son says it won’t change how she uses the platform.

“We’re a non­prof­it. This is a good way to cre­ate out­reach and engage­ment with­out added cost, so we’ll con­tin­ue to use it. It will sim­ply make our work a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult,” says Denson.

Mon­i­ca Wright, Mar­ket­ing Land’s own vice pres­i­dent of growth and engage­ment, says her team is now native­ly retweet­ing con­tent that pre­vi­ous­ly would have been simul­ta­ne­ous­ly post­ed across the company’s mul­ti­ple Twit­ter accounts. Wright over­sees the social accounts for all Third Door Media prop­er­ties — Mar­ket­ing Land, Search Engine Land, MarTech Today, SMX, MarTech Con­fer­ence and Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Depot. She says the updates def­i­nite­ly impact her team, but they have not caused too much of a drain on their time.

“If it’s a sto­ry on one site that is rel­a­tive to anoth­er site, we sim­ply retweet the sto­ry from each Twit­ter account,” says Wright.

This sen­ti­ment — that it’s going to make things more dif­fi­cult, but ulti­mate­ly not change behav­ior — appears to be the gen­er­al con­sen­sus, says Ander­son. When asked what feed­back he has heard from clients, the CEO says the change seems to fall into the cat­e­go­ry of “mild incon­ve­nience” for most.

“They, of course, would rather not be incon­ve­nienced but will adapt to the change,” says Ander­son. “When you look at all the oth­er changes hap­pen­ing with social plat­forms, this is far from the biggest issue.”

The CEO says his com­pa­ny has com­mu­ni­cat­ed Twitter’s pol­i­cy updates to clients and is mod­i­fy­ing SocialFlow’s plat­form to com­ply with the updates.

“After adjust­ing to this change, users won’t be able to select mul­ti­ple Twit­ter han­dles in a drop-down menu,” says Ander­son. “If a user wants to pub­lish the same mes­sage to three dif­fer­ent Twit­ter han­dles, she’ll need to make the posts one by one or retweet the orig­i­nal post from the oth­er handles.”

Den­son, who uses Tweet­Deck and Hoot­suite, says both have been updated.

“I can still post iden­ti­cal con­tent, but I can’t do it simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. I have to do each one indi­vid­u­al­ly,” says Denson.

Twitter’s recommendations

In the post announc­ing its pol­i­cy updates, Twit­ter rec­om­mend­ed retweets as an alter­na­tive now that tweets with iden­ti­cal con­tent could no longer be auto­mat­ed across mul­ti­ple accounts. It not­ed that retweets, “… should only be done from a small num­ber of dis­tinct accounts that you direct­ly con­trol,” and aggres­sive or high-vol­ume auto­mat­ed retweets are not permitted.

Any­one break­ing the rules could have their Twit­ter account sus­pend­ed. The site also gave a March 23, 2018, dead­line for social media man­age­ment apps to make nec­es­sary changes so that their plat­forms com­plied with the pol­i­cy updates.

Dorsey did say dur­ing his livestream that Twitter’s inten­tion was to even­tu­al­ly open the ver­i­fi­ca­tion process to every­one. Of course, that doesn’t mean Twit­ter would like­ly roll back rules around simul­ta­ne­ous tweets just because all users were giv­en an oppor­tu­ni­ty to ver­i­fy their accounts.

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