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Twitter Terms of Service: How to Stick to the Rules With Smart Social Media Scheduling

If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed that sometimes, people use Twitter for not-so-nice reasons.

Reasons like spamming hashtags, creating fake profiles, or, you know, trying to destabilize the democratic process in other countries.

(Little stuff like that.)

Back in February 2018, Twitter announced a few major policy changes to prevent the types of behaviors that hurt the overall user experience.

Part of the Twitter terms of service means cracking down on bots, so users don’t have to contend with so many fraudulent accounts in their timelines and mentions.

Twitter post rules mean there are limitations on what users can do using schedulers and automation tools – so if you’ve ever scheduled a tweet, this is something you want to know about!

Here at MeetEdgar, we want to encourage a user experience that’s in line with the Twitter TOS. This article will outline the sorts of actions that could get you in trouble on Twitter.

(Because even if Twitter’s TOS changes weren’t made to stop you from doing what you’re doing, sticking to the rules is usually a pretty good idea anyway.)

How to follow the Twitter terms of service

Although there has not been a Twitter new terms of service since the big announcement back in 2018, there have been some updates on privacy policies and policies to help stop the spread of misinformation.

So, how can you abide by the rules for Twitter and not accidentally get into trouble?

Let’s take a closer look.

Posting identical content across multiple accounts

When you manage more than one Twitter account, it can make a lot of sense to share certain tweets on both accounts.

A place like The New York Times, for example, might write a single tweet that it can use for several of the different Twitter accounts it manages:

tweet repetition

Nothing too controversial about that, right?

Unfortunately, scheduling the same tweet to go out on multiple accounts can also be a little, well, shady.

For example, a business owner who wants to make it seem like they have a lot of fans might whip up a few hundred fake accounts, write a single promotional Tweet, then send it out using all of them:

tweet recyling

Not ideal.

And that’s a pretty modest example!

Imagine thousands of phony profiles based in your hometown, for example, all tweeting using the same hashtag and fooling Twitter into promoting that hashtag in your trending topics. When one person or group is able to send the same message to multiple accounts all at once, it can seriously disrupt the free flow of information!

Twitter has a clear directive to scheduling tools: “your service should not permit a user to select several accounts they control from which to publish a given tweet.”

For example, the policy does not allow a single social update to be associated with more than one Twitter account. In accordance with Twitter’s TOS, it is only assignable to one Twitter account at a time.

This change to Twitter’s TOS made the network a lot more useful for everyone in the long run – because honestly, less spam and fewer bots are pretty good things to work toward.

Performing simultaneous actions across accounts

In the past, some tools have given users the option of performing a single type of action, like retweeting or following, from multiple accounts.

Twitter put a stop to that with their new Twitter TOS updated in 2020 called the Platform Manipulation and Spam policy.

As per their TOS Twitter “Do not (and do not allow users to) simultaneously perform actions such as likes, retweets, or follows from multiple accounts.”

It’s pretty easy to imagine how this sort of ability could be taken advantage of – or even abused.

Imagine a business owner who retweets one of their company’s tweets from hundreds of fake accounts all at once, or a social media manager who uses fake accounts to like a client’s tweets and artificially inflate their engagement rates!

These aren’t things that the average marketer or entrepreneur are probably doing, but Twitter wants to keep it under control.

So stay away from tools that allow you to do things like select multiple Twitter accounts you manage and perform the same action from all of those accounts at once. Behavior like this is in violation of Twitter’s TOS!

 


 

Scheduling and automating identical tweets

In the past, actions like recycling your tweets by posting them again and again over time were only considered problematic in excess, like a user posting the same tweet every couple of minutes.

By comparison, posting the same tweet that you posted a day, a week, or a month ago was generally considered fair game – even to the extent that major brands and media companies made it a staple of their content strategies.

But that has not been the case for several years now.

Twitter significantly increased its limitations on recycling tweets – a decision that ultimately curbed a lot of spammy and abusive behavior.

It also meant a slight shift in the way marketers plan and share their content.

So, what do Twitter’s policies have to say about recycling your content these days?

Here’s one behavior that may get you flagged for spamming, from the Twitter rules:

“If 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.”

(Take special note of that “multiple duplicate updates on one account” part.)

And from Twitter’s automation rules:

“You may not post duplicative or substantially similar tweets on one account or over multiple accounts you operate.”

Long story short?

Whether you recycle your tweets across multiple Twitter accounts or on just one, it’s officially against the tweet rules – and Twitter enforces those rules more strictly than ever.

This means you can’t write an update and send it to both your personal account and to your company’s branded account. If you’re using a scheduler like Edgar, you can not check off more than one Twitter account on the content composer to have that tweet go out to both of them at the same time.

Rest assured, Edgar does have precautions that have been put in place that no longer let you check off two Twitter accounts in the composer, so if you are a current Edgar user, you know we’ve got your back. We’re not going to let you be in violation of this rule. No worries there.

So how do you keep on sharing your evergreen content without violating the rules of Twitter? With some smart rewording and switching up your media of course! Here are eight simple ideas for creating variations for your tweets.

Twitter new TOS to stop misleading content

We don’t need to tell you this, but you shouldn’t share content on Twitter that could be deemed misleading or interfere with any civic processes.

In October 2021, Twitter updated its Civic integrity policy so that anyone sharing misleading information would be penalized or banned from the platform.

Twitter now highlights information it deems to be false or misleading and users can report misinformation. They even partnered with a team of professional fact checkers to try and eliminate misinformation from the platform.

They are cracking down on users who spread fake news and other false information to make the platform a safer, more user-friendly place for people to network.

Here’s some more inspiration on using Twitter authentically:

Edgar’s variations & auto variations features

When Twitter’s terms of services changed, we wanted to find a way that our users could quickly and easily create multiple variations on the same piece of content so you can stay within Twitter’s TOS and continue to promote the same piece of content without having to constantly add updates to your library.

You can use Edgar variations and auto variations to do this!

When you add new content into Edgar, you can add variations using the Add Variation button.

Edgar content composer with variations

You can add as many variations as you’d like so you can keep promoting that specific piece of content on Twitter and you can keep your posts fresh and different on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Once you’ve hit “Save to Library,” Edgar automatically saves all your different variations into your library.

Because of Twitter’s TOS, variations for Twitter accounts will automatically expire after they have been posted so you don’t have to worry about any variations violating Twitter’s terms of service!

Since Edgar is smart, he saves all your variations together in a batch. This way, Edgar won’t pull from the same batch of variations twice so you won’t have variations posting back to back. (Just make sure you have pieces of content scheduled in your category!)

In your content library, you can see which updates have variations in the right corner. Edgar even tells you if variations have expired for Twitter.

Twitter variations

You can also easily see all your variations in each batch. They stay perfectly organized for you!

Twitter variations

But since Edgar likes to be extra helpful, we made it even easier to create variations with the auto variations feature!

With the auto variations feature, Edgar will write your variations for you!

Here’s how it works:

You write a status with a link to some content, whether that’s a landing page, blog post or article.

Then click the “Auto-generate variations” button and Edgar will pull out key phrases and sentences from the link to generate variations for you!

This quick video demo will give you a glimpse at how the magic happens:

 

It’s just like magic, isn’t it?

via GIPHY

What do you think of Twitter’s TOS?

Do you have experience repurposing your Twitter content to stay in line with the terms of service?

Have you had problems with misinformation on the platform?

Have Twitter cast their net too wide in their efforts to stop spam, or do you think it’ll all make Twitter a better place in the end?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

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68 Comments
  • I have decided to stop using twitter for myself and my customers because of the retweeting of duplicate content changes. Firstly it isn’t clear to me what they actually mean by that I understand that tweets exactly the same but will you be able to retweet a different message with the same link or not? Also the chances of catching your particular audience at that one moment in time are next to hopeless. If the average person spends less than 2 minutes at any given time then how do you pick that. Im hanging out with Meet Edgar for another month to see if your new changes can help otherwise I might as well go back to native scheduling across all the other platforms once a week.

    • Tom VanBuren

      Our product team is hard at work on some new features, and the one mentioned in this post is their number one priority! We’ll be sending our users an email soon that will give a closer look at how you can expect it to work.

  • Tom VanBuren

    Really interesting idea! The only issue is that unfortunately, Twitter only allows you to retweet yourself (or anyone else) one time. If you want to retweet yourself more than once, you have to find your original retweet, UN-retweet it, then RE-retweet it, which moves its place in the timeline. So even if you go through that process, the retweets won’t be cumulative – the number of retweets that show on the tweet will remain the same.

  • Paul Cunningham

    So, have I missed an announcement about the release of new Edgar features to deal with this? My queue is pretty much empty now, so my Twitter has gone silent except for some one-time stuff I’m feeding into it.

      • Paul Cunningham

        That’s my question. They aren’t released yet? My Twitter queues have run dry. I had actually assumed all my tweets would get one more go each before they were expired, giving plenty of time for the new features to arrive, but it looks like you’ve expired them all straight away, so I’m in a bit of a situation now.

        • Tom VanBuren

          Understandable! The changes we’ve made are to ensure that our users are in compliance with Twitter’s new Terms of Service, which means that content that’s been posted before – even content originally posted before Twitter announced these changes – is not eligible to be shared on Twitter again. We can’t in good faith put our users at risk by facilitating an experience that violates Twitter’s TOS, especially given that before these changes were finalized, a not-insignificant number of users started to be penalized by Twitter for the same repeating behaviors that used to be unproblematic. (So this isn’t an exercise in preventing just theoretical consequences, but rather, actual consequences.)

          As far as new features go, we’re currently building and testing features that will fundamentally improve the way our users add new content for Twitter, and how Edgar will sort and post that content – they’re major updates, but they’re also our number one priority right now, and we’re looking forward to launching them as soon as they’re ready! In the meantime, we definitely hear you, along with all our users, and appreciate your patience as we build out the features that will make it easier to save time on Twitter scheduling while still complying with Twitter’s TOS.

          • Just got linked to this after talking to your support people this issue. This post was written a month ago, so curious when we can expect to see some of these promised updates…or at least a screenshot or teaser of what they will actually do? I’m pretty close to cancelling.

          • Tom VanBuren

            Hi Jason! We actually sent out an email about what our developers are currently working on last month, and will be sending another, more in-depth look soon. (We just want to make sure that we’re accurately representing how users can expect everything to work – sometimes functionality details have to be adjusted during development.) If you have any questions or concerns about your account in the meantime, though, the support team you’ve been corresponding with will be happy to help!

  • I may keep recycling my sign-up pages, YouTube videos and blog posts but I will stop posting Monday Motivation and Happy Friday tweets altogether now.

    I’ll keep using Twitter to chat to people, but losing the ability to recycle evergreen content to maintain brand/content awareness, means there’s no point in spending time creating fresh content for solely fun purposes – it’s not time or cost effective and yields no tangible results.

    Most of my traffic comes from Facebook so these new changes mean I’ll be winding down my Twitter use.

  • Jordanne Waldschmidt

    How will this impact influencer and event marketing? You often see events like SXSW asking exhibitors to share pre-drafted tweets and images promoting their presence at the event. I would assume this will have to stop completely or the accounts will be flagged?

    • Tom VanBuren

      I’d imagine that this sort of thing won’t necessarily be effected. Something like that is a case of the same thing being tweeted by many individuals acting independently of one another – not an action being repeated by a single person, or performed en masse by one person across many accounts. (By contrast, if one person tweeted the same pre-drafted message over and over, for example, THAT would be problematic.)

  • Michelle Manafy

    Most tweets are not seen. That is the nature of Twitter. Thus, reposting content to try to get it seen is a solid strategy. Not too often–for sure, because you will alienate your audience and that is never a good strategy. Regarding Meet Edgar, though: Wasn’t this your product differentiator? The ability to reuse evergreen content at a nice, measured pace? Please clarify.

    • Tom VanBuren

      Edgar can still reuse evergreen content on Facebook and LinkedIn, and for Twitter, we’re building a new way for users to add content that will make it easy to abide by the rules while still quickly loading up lots of Tweets at once – including ones that all promote the same link! (We sent an email about it last week, but if you didn’t get it, you can get all the details about what’s on our roadmap – including things like Instagram and the feature I was just describing – at [email protected]!)

  • eliisrael

    Twitter is committing suicide. It’s as simple as that.

    The lifecycle of a tweet is too short to avoid repeating content. While the bots need to go (and I’ve been saying so for years), what they’ve done here is use a nuclear bomb to fix the problem.

    Sell your shares, they’re cooked.

  • W. Curtis Preston

    Even though Edgar’s interpretation of the phrase “multiple duplicate updates on one account” is technically correct, I wonder if it’s what Twitter had in mind. I see posting 100 duplicate tweets in one day being a problem. Reposting the same tweet two weeks later shouldn’t be a violation, even if it appears to be at this point.

    Has anyone from edgar actually discussed this with twitter? Can they add any phrasing like “within a short period of time” or something like that to the rule to clarify?

    • Tom VanBuren

      This response from Twitter’s staff in their developer forums should give some additional context: https://twittercommunity.com/t/question-about-scheduled-posts-on-a-single-account/101807

      User: “if the tweet is from the same account can we post the tweet multiple times – from the same account?”
      Twitter staff: “I would have to say no this is not ok.”

      Twitter’s rules ARE broad – so broad, in fact, that they may not always be enforced with 100% consistency. (We’ve seen people get suspended for reposting the same Tweet weeks later, as you described, while others don’t.)

      That said, and given what we’ve heard from Twitter both in their TOS and in their staff’s responses to inquiries like yours, we just can’t in good faith facilitate a way for users to violate Twitter’s TOS in this fashion, and to perform actions that could get them suspended from the network – even if they wouldn’t necessarily be caught or face negative consequences 100% of the time.

  • Ines O'Donovan, PhD

    I second this … especially the hashtag option. Ideally the best hashtags for a tweet are automatically offered by MeetEdgar.

    I think it’s sad that Twitter limits it to 1-time posting only as tweets have an extremely short lifetime … and many are actually very useful to the viewers.

    I do, of course, agree that none of us wants to see spamming … or spam people, so finding a solution that allows e.g. reposting the same tweet every month or so … or maybe a certain percentage of the total amounts of post … would be much more useful solutions.

    Otherwise Twitter really does become a tool that takes too much time for a small business owner. I’m already posting additional tweets & retweets every day … not from MeetEdgar … but need the insurance that there is good information going out from my account every day. I don’t have the time or money to create new posts and images all the time.

    I hope that Twitter reads these types of forums and posts!

  • Tom VanBuren

    You raise some very good points! I think that if nothing else, automation and scheduling are going to significantly evolve – so while the old-fashioned “post the exact same Tweet over and over” sort of automation will no longer be en vogue, other, more advanced types of automation and scheduling will take its place. (We’re actually working on a more advanced solution ourselves!) Click-to-tweets probably won’t go anywhere, just because they don’t generally violate the spirit of Twitter’s TOS changes – they’re still manual actions that you can only take from one Twitter account at a time, so their potential for spamming is considerably less. But all in all, you’re right – social marketers are definitely going to have to make some adjustments to their strategies!

  • Tom VanBuren

    Great question! According to Twitter, their new rule regarding the publication of a single Tweet across multiple accounts applies “regardless of whether the Tweets are published to Twitter at the same time, or are scheduled/queued for future publication.” So basically, what you’re describing – publishing a Tweet to one account, then publishing it to a different account later on – would still be considered a violation. That in mind, we’re working on a new feature that’ll make it easy to upload variations on a single Tweet, so you can more easily schedule content across different Twitter accounts – we’ll email with some more news on that one soon!

  • Tom VanBuren

    That’s for Twitter to decide – and they haven’t given *any* indication as to anything that specific (which gives them an understandably appealing bit of wiggle room to figure it out as they go).

  • Tom VanBuren

    Just because of the nature of developing this sort of thing, we don’t have an exact release date at this time. That said, though, we’re big fans of iteration here – so we’ll be launching it as soon as it’s ready! (As opposed to, as soon as it’s completely perfect in every conceivable way.) Our priority is definitely to give our users new options that work, even if that means we refine them over time after they’re released!

  • Sherm Stevens

    I have a bunch of clients in the same verticals that I provide posting services for. If I can’t mass tweet duplicate content, I’ll just drop it from the offering.

    What would be a GREAT feature, moving forward, would be the ability to SPIN content right in the ME dashboard. Or some sort of mailmerge type feature, where you could substitute a list of words or sentences as each tweet is pushed out.

    This would be a great feature for other sites as well (like FB) and would help answer the objection that almost every client has regarding duplicate content.

    I’m curious, will Twitter filters be able to detect duplicate images? Frequently, we batch process infographic images for clients, adding their logo, so technically they are different. We recycle them about every 3 months. We could simply resize or change the images slightly, but that is a LOT of extra work.

    • Tom VanBuren

      Great suggestion about spinning content in the ME dashboard – in fact, we’re working on something like that right now! (The short version is, it’ll be easy to upload multiple variations on a single Tweet all at the same time – so keep an eye on your inbox for more details!)

      As for images, that’s a good question. Twitter hasn’t specified whether “content,” in this context, refers solely to text, or also to images – probably so that they have the leeway to make up their minds about that later on. So all we can really do there is wait and see!

      • BlogALiving

        Wait. Up above, I thought you were saying we can only share a given link once, ever, on a single account – that rewriting it doesn’t cut it. And that’s clearly how the app is now functioning, given that my entire queue is suddenly gone, and so are a lot of other people’s. But here you seem to be saying that if we write different variations of the tweet, we can post the link more than once. Please clarify.

        • Tom VanBuren

          You can share the same link more than once – you just can’t use the same Tweet copy verbatim, or make only very small edits (like changing a period into an exclamation point, for example). Twitter has been vague about how they define “substantially similar, ” but these rules target Tweets that repeat the same copy overall, not ones that share a URL that’s already been shared.

  • Tom VanBuren

    You raise an EXCELLENT point about click-to-tweet and social sharing buttons. Twitter hasn’t indicated that users should expect any changes in regard to those, which I think makes sense in context of the rationale behind their TOS changes. Twitter is expanding the scope of (and more strictly enforcing) its scheduling rules because it wants to prevent spam and over-automation, and to limit users’ ability to manage fraudulent accounts. Click-to-tweet and social sharing buttons aren’t necessarily a significant part of that problem, because sharing by those means isn’t an automated behavior, and it isn’t one that users can easily complete across multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. I wouldn’t expect those sorts of sharing options to be affected.

    • I need to ask here. How can twitter identify those tweets from others sent by any app or webapp?
      I think the spammers will use some of the already existing apps to send “like they were pushing the button” and this rules will only damage the people that use twitter for marketing.
      Are they going to forbid to duplicated paid tweets? I am sure they won´t…

    • But, click-to-tweet is still the SAME content.
      If, Tom, Kathy and I all go to Website X and want to share their article, we three will all post “such and such and stuff. read the article at Website X dot com” to Twitter. Duplicate. Same. Not really stopping ‘spammy’ there as far as I call tell.
      Hopefully the new thing Edgar is working on will help make ‘spinning’ posts a little less painful. Still, once the end of the queue is reach, the process will just have to be done all over again. Bummer, that.

      • Tom VanBuren

        You’re right about click-to-tweets still being duplicate content – the differentiator is how they’re being shared. If three people each click that button to share on their accounts, those are three people performing an action individually and manually. If any one of those people used the same click-to-tweet button repeatedly, that might be a problem, but because these are non-automated actions being taken in real-time by individuals, it isn’t the type of “duplicate” content Twitter is focused on right now.

        As has been pointed out in other comments on this post, this doesn’t mean that click-to-tweets are impervious to abuse (as in, the use of “click farms,” but that’s a separate issue, and one that Twitter will undoubtedly have to deal with in a context separate from this one!

  • Tom VanBuren

    That one’s entirely up to Twitter! Their rules state that “You may not post duplicative or substantially similar Tweets on one account,” so whether or not multiple Tweets like what you’re describing count as “substantially similar” is at their discretion.

  • Paul Cunningham

    This is going to be painful. I have a large library of tweets being repurposed, but any given tweet only goes out about once per 2-3 months.

    I guess they will just start getting “archived” by Edgar once this change goes in.

    Team, looking forward to seeing the new feature. Hopefully it lets us pluck archive tweets out and rewrite them in multiple ways that aren’t “substantially similar” per Twitter ToS. My concern is that they then become *different* and some scheduling snafu (like reshuffling a the queue) doesn’t put them all together instead of being spaced out over time :-/

    • Tom VanBuren

      Thanks for sharing your feedback, Paul! Definitely agree that when something like this forces change, the transition period can come with some growing pains. That said, we’re genuinely excited about the changes we’re making to how you can upload content – it’s based on a LOT of user feedback, and all in all, it’s going to make sharing on Twitter feel a lot more advanced!

      • Mike Nunyabizness

        The problem is they aren’t just targeting bots, they are targeting people because of political beliefs too.

  • Michelle

    So once a tweet has been posted using Edgar, will it move to a status or category where the user can go tweak the wording? I get what they’re doing. For marketers it means we’ll just have to come up with more variations. | I wonder if as it’s implemented and the worst offenders are under control, they’ll give marketers a break and say you can repeat a tweet up to X times – as long as there’s X amount of time in between. After all the life of a tweet is only 3-5 seconds?

    • Tom VanBuren

      Great question! Once Edgar sends a Tweet, it will be marked in your library as having been sent, and whether or not it’s edited afterward, it won’t be posted to Twitter again. That being the case, we’re building a new way of adding Twitter content that will actually be MUCH faster and easier than having to go back into your library and edit old Tweets that have already been sent. (The short version is, you’ll be able to add multiple versions of a Tweet all at the same time — instead of having to keep coming back later and edit a Tweet to make variations, you’ll be able to create and load variations all at once.) We’ll have more details on that soon, but it’s going to be an exciting improvement!

      • eliisrael

        This will help for repetitions of a limited duration, for sure. (e.g. Remind everyone for the next 10 days to get their entries into our contest.)

        But for true reusable content (evergreen blog posts, landmark articles, etc), there’s only so many ways to say the same thing.

        And Twitter has given zero guidance on what it means for tweets to be “substantially similar,” either. One assumes they’re going to do this algorithmically, but no matter what approach they use, reasonable re-use is going to take a hit.

        Or perhaps, as usual, they’re just leaving things idiotically vague and putting the judgement calls in the hands of low-level employees who each apply their own bias.

        I’m angry with Twitter right now. Can you tell?

        Love you guys at MeetEdgar, though.

      • Brian

        The problem I’m already seeing is that Edgar is unwittingly expiring Facebook content in cases where one post is being checked to be published to Twitter AND Facebook. Seems like a bug. And a really bad one. ☹️

        • Tom VanBuren

          Hi Brian! This looks like a bug that’s currently affecting the way the queue appears in the app, but is not affecting what’s actually being posted. We’re working on fixing that up now, but if you have any questions in the meantime or are hitting any other snags, please let our support team know at [email protected] – they’re real, live people, so you can expect the personalized attention you deserve!

  • Brian

    Thanks this was helpful. I’ve never been a fan of twitter anyway and now the removing the ability to recycle tweet pretty much ends it for me. I have about 3-5 different quotes pulled from all my blog posts that were on a once a day cycle in twitter so that old content gets regularly resurfaced. But looks like that will be over…as I said I never really cared about twitter anyway so I’ll probably just close that account. it only ever amounted to 2% of my sites traffic anyway.

  • Bots, aggressive churn, spam and all of that SHOULD be targeted.

    But never posting the same tweet? That will hurt the service and I don’t think is enforceable. If I wake up and say “Wassup world?” I can never say that again? If I say, “Glad to be watching my favorite show!” I can never tweet that again? If I send a link to a favorite story, I can never again say, “I just re-read this and it touches me every time.” Or if I retweet something 2 years from now?

    If any of this is true, it will cause a massive backlash against Twitter and diminish its usefulness to anyone. Facebook already is laborious to post through here or anywhere. Linked In isn’t the issue nor why most use these services.

    It will be interesting to see what happens….

    • Tom VanBuren

      It absolutely WILL be interesting to see what happens! In the past, Twitter has generally been fairly lenient in what it identifies as spam – now, though, it’s much more aggressive in what it flags. Technically, their rules do state that any type of repeating (not including retweets) violates their TOS, and they’ve increasingly been using that broad definition to suspend accounts for repeating-oriented behaviors that weren’t problematic in the past. It will be interesting to see if/when they fine-tune that definition, but for the time being, duplicative content is flatly considered a violation of the rules, and Twitter has been enforcing and expanding those rules much more than they used to.

    • Steven@BIGDaddy

      Agreed, and in all honesty I cant see that being the case, Im sure they have released this but if that was done, Twitter will die, we all say the same things all of the time, these are called habits……….. Twitter I love you, but to the common man this is nuts!!!

    • Tom VanBuren

      That probably depends on whether the content being posted is unique or repeated – but since Twitter chats are so frequently a “live” activity (as opposed to a prescheduled one), it’s very likely that many of them won’t be affected. (By comparison, if someone were continually repeating the same chat questions/prompts, that might get flagged by Twitter.)

  • Dan Lear

    Is there any kind of time limit on these new restrictions? I get the “no same or similar Tweets from one account in the same day” but what about 2 days or 2 weeks later?

    • Tom VanBuren

      Good question! Especially because in the past, these rules generally HAVE operated in the context of a time limit – posting something multiple times within 24 hours, for example. Twitter’s restrictions on repeating content have become significantly stricter, though, especially as they’ve rolled out more and more restrictions on how a single piece of content can be scheduled. With increasing frequency, Twitter users have been issued temporary suspensions for repeating content that’s far outside that former 24-hour window – content from weeks prior, for example. That being the case, it seems that Twitter’s former timeframe-based leniency is no longer dependable, and that they’re casting a much wider net in terms of cracking down on repeated content.

      • I think that’s the real question: what is the time limit on the rule “You may not post duplicative or substantially similar Tweets on one account” ?

        It is incomprehensible that the limit is “ever.” And it’s a meaningless statement if the time limit is “something, but we aren’t saying what.”

  • This is incredibly helpful! I’ve been wondering what I did or am doing to land myself in Twitter Jail. I recently read the TOS and realized that duplicate identical tweets cannot be reused and shut off automation for old podcast episodes so I can rewrite them in a unique way and be sure they don’t get repeated. But, I didn’t realize that having multiple accounts with similar content was an issue. I appreciate the heads up on that! And thanks to Laura Roeder for sharing this in B-School – super helpful to those of us scratching our heads.

    • Tom VanBuren

      Glad this was helpful! Yes, the “multiple accounts with duplicate content” thing is pretty new – Twitter only announced it in February, and gave scheduling tools a comply-by date of March 23, 2018.

  • Maureen Robson

    So am I right in thinking that one of the stated benefits of Edgar, ie to enable repeating updates, is no longer going to be allowed? From the notes above “it means you should expect scheduling tools that have allowed for automated content recycling to no longer offer that service for Twitter accounts.” Does this mean Edgar? Can you clarify please?

    • Tom VanBuren

      Edgar will continue to provide automated update repeating on Facebook and LinkedIn, but continuing to provide that service on Twitter would be a direct violation of Twitter’s TOS, and would also facilitate Edgar’s users committing TOS violations that could result in their own Twitter accounts being suspended. That being the case, Edgar will no longer be able to repeat content on Twitter as of later this month, and we’re currently building new solutions that will make adding Twitter content faster and easier without putting our users at risk. You can also reach our support team at [email protected] if you’d like more information!

      • Maureen Robson

        OK, I find it odd. Are Twitter saying that you can only send a tweet once? I mean it’s quite common to send a new tweet 2 or 3 times so that people who missed it first time get a chance to see it again.

        • Tom VanBuren

          You’re absolutely right – that’s been a common strategy for some time! (And such being the case, Edgar and other scheduling tools have made automatic recycling a feature in the past!) As it stands, though, Twitter is becoming increasingly strict about its policies regarding repeating content, and many of those users who have made it part of their strategy in the past are now experiencing issues like temporary suspensions from Twitter. Between these recent changes and the fact that Twitter’s TOS clearly states that you may not post duplicative Tweets on one account (or across several accounts), this is an increasingly risky strategy.

          • LionessofAfrica

            So if you have built a database of different tweets that repeat once every 30 days (hardly spammy), you will be in breach of the new twitter rules?

          • Tom VanBuren

            According to Twitter’s TOS, posting duplicative content DOES violate their rules, and Twitter users have increasingly faced temporary suspensions for repetition similar to what you’re describing. In the past, they’ve been lenient with content that doesn’t repeat very often, but that has stopped being the case with more and more frequency.

          • Interested to see what you guys come up with – this is the feature that has always attracted me towards Edgar, specifically with regards to Twitter. With posting amounts/frequencies being so much higher on Twitter than other networks, it’s a much more helpful feature for tweets than it is for FB or LI in my world.

            All the best to the team, will be looking out for your next move!

          • Tom VanBuren

            Thanks, Joe! We’re building some new features right now that’ll make it a lot easier to load up Twitter content, and we can’t wait to show ’em off – it’s going to be a great alternative to the old-fashioned repeating that Twitter doesn’t look so kindly on anymore!

          • I keep saying “wow” as in I can’t believe they are really doing this. It’s going to be too time consuming for the small business owner that doesn’t have time to keep plugging in new content. I will be interesting to see what MeetEdgar comes up with as an alternative but it by that time it may be too late. Many of us may need to say “bye-bye Twitter” and look for other ways to market themselves. It’s pretty frustrating.

          • eliisrael

            Twitter position will be, “if you want your content to repeat in front of a bigger audience, buy ads.”

            It’s suicidal, but that’s what they’ll do.

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