New Twitter rules from Friday 23-March

Twitter are implementing several new rules on Friday 23rd March. These are primarily designed to stamp out the recent plague of spurious, fake and spam bot accounts. However these changes may affect the way you currently use Twitter to promote your business and brand.

Firstly some good news - one change is unlikely to have much affect on most businesses using Twitter. From Friday it won't be permitted to post identical content simultaneously across multiple accounts.

However the rule change most likely to affect business relates to recycling tweets over a period of time. This is a common practice for the business community – right from small micro businesses through to large and familiar brands. 

Why do this you may say! Here are three very good reasons

1. Generally only 5-15% of followers see an individual tweet. Due to the nature of the Twitter environment tweets have a short lifespan before being effectively consigned to history. Giving tweets a regular re-airing every week or two provides multiple new opportunities for people to see messages they have previously missed.
2. Hopefully you are working to grow your Twitter account and broaden the spread of your messages by attracting new followers. Assuming you are then every reused tweet is automatically a new tweet to your new followers (at least for a good while especially when you factor in the point above). (Yes, I know a new follower could trawl down your Twitter page, but how often will that happen in practice?)
3. It is an inherently efficient approach that considerably reduces the time overhead of your account which allows you to focus on higher priority tasks. Also, if you sell widgets, how many different things can you say about widgets? Of course you can add in extra content such as what you had for breakfast or what you did at the weekend. This is harmless fun/interest content, but is it going to help raise the profile of your widget company and tell the world about them and how wonderful they are? I'd say not!

So what will happen on Friday?

The honest question is no-one outside of Twitter really knows. For obvious reasons they do not reveal in detail how their algorithms work so the only way to discover this may be to “suck it and see” both in terms these two questions

•  How tightly Twitter apply the reused tweets policy - will any reuse of a previous tweet regardless of the interval period be flagged as a violation or will they only look back a few days or weeks?
•  How will Twitter handle a rule violation - will they initially send a friendly warning message asking to desist the activity or will accounts be blocked/suspended with/without a process to plead penance and recover the account?

In light of these unknowns what should you do?

The way I see it, there are two options:

1. Continue as is and ride it out and see what happens, accepting the risk of some short or long term disruption to your Twitter account.
2. Temporarily suspend tweeting of any recycled content on 22nd March and wait until you have a better idea of how Twitter rules operate. This is low risk but at the price of either costing time creating new tweets each and every day.

Do you reuse Twitter content or post across multiple accounts? Are you planning to change the way you use Twitter from Friday?

You thoughts and comments would be welcome.