What You Need to Know about Recent Changes of Twitter Rules and the Impact on Twitter Marketing

It is a coincidence that both Twitter and Facebook changed their API rules recently. Twitter is a major social media platform used by business owners and individuals for marketing, engagement, and personal social networking. Many people have multiple Twitter accounts for business and personal use. Some people create multiple accounts with similar contents to attempt for increasing the market influence. The new Twitter rule is to address the issue of multiple account abuse and automated spam. The new rule has affected the legitimate use of Twitter tool for Twitter management and engagement. For example, Social Bee, a SaaS social media tool with emphasis on Twitter, had to make adjustments and downgrades on some of the features in response to the new Twitter rules.

Social Bee has a recent announcement within the tool regarding the new Twitter rule:

“Thanks” to the recent Twitter rule changes, you won’t be able to select more than one Twitter account when creating your posts, adding RSS or Pocket configs, doing Imports and so on 😞

You WILL still be able to manage multiple Twitter accounts, but you'll need to add the Twitter content one at a time 😃

Twitter's goal with these changes is to stop the posting of duplicate content from multiple accounts 👌

Similar changes will be implemented by ALL social media management platforms (if they want to be compliant with Twitter's new ToS) 🔨

Even though this might cause some minor inconveniences at first, we welcome Twitter's recent changes which are meant to bring the platform to its former glory and we feel that on the long run these changes will benefit everyone involved 😎

You can read all about these Twitter rule changes and how it will affect your account here 👉 https://help.socialbee.io/faqs/new-twitter-rules-on-automation-and-the-use-of-multiple-accounts

The new Twitter rule imposed the following restrictions. Users should not do this anymore either using a Twitter tool, via Twitter API, or directly on Twitter.

1. Do not use multiple accounts for identical or substantially similar contents.

People do create multiple Twitter accounts and add the same contents at the same time. This didn't need extra efforts by using Social Bee or other social media tools. But not any more. The new rule of Twitter states that "Do not (and do not allow your users to) simultaneously post identical or substantially similar content to multiple accounts. For example, your service should not permit a user to select several accounts they control from which to publish a given Tweet." 

 Right now, to address this rule, Social Bee has disabled the selection of multiple Twitter accounts, thus you won't accidentally post the same tweet to more than one account. Twitter says that "as an alternative to posting identical content, you can Retweet content from one account from the other accounts you wish to share that post from. This should only be done from a small number of distinct accounts that you directly control. " But this practice is not really necessary from the marketing perspective.

2. Do not post duplicate content multiple times on the same or multiple accounts. 

If you post the same picture to multiple Twitter accounts at the same time, or twitter the same message again and again, you are considered to be spamming, and your account could be in trouble. Twitter is now very concerned about you you "post duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account, or create duplicate or substantially similar accounts;" Thus, don't do it.

This rule directly affects the so-called "evergreen posting" that Social Bee and many other tools promote as a very cool feature. The evergreen feature allows you to create a content to be posted repetitively on either a fixed or random schedule. Obviously, this is against the rule of duplicate content on multi-posting.

The cute solution of Social Bee is to make evergreen posting as retweet. There is no restriction retweeting your own contents.  Therefore in Social Bee, before you post any tweet, the tool will check to see if a post was already posted through SocialBee to any of your Twitter accounts, in which case Social Bee will retweet the original post.

New Twitter Rules:

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules