How Twitter’s Spam Crackdown Impacts PR & Marketing and How to Adapt

In an effort to crackdown on bots and spam, Twitter has banned simultaneous tweets of identical content across multiple accounts.

The use of multiple accounts is one of the most common spam violations. Tweeting across multiple accounts is a common trick used to artificially amplify or inflate the prominence of tweets. The technique was used to influence elections in the U.S. and around the world.

It’s also a fairly common marketing tactic of legitimate brands and publishers who would never considered themselves spammers. But even marketers who innocently tweet the same content on different accounts risk Twitter’s reprisal.

“To be clear: Twitter prohibits any attempt to use automation for the purposes of posting or disseminating spam, and such behavior may result in enforcement action,” writes Yoel Roth of Twitter in a company blog post. This applies regardless of whether the Tweets are published the same time or scheduled for future publication. Automated scheduling services such as Hootsuite had up to March 23 to adjust their tools. Users who tried to post to different accounts simultaneously receive an error message.

Who will Feel the Greatest Impact?

The update will definitely impact brands, media outlets and other Twitter users. National media companies that have dozens or even hundreds of local media outlets will feel the greatest impact.

Marketers fret that social media marketing will become more time consuming. Marketers frequently oversee multiple Twitter accounts – all legitimate – and post the same content across different accounts. Jessica Denson communications manager at Connected Nation, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding high-speed internet, manages more than 10.

The new rule “means taking the same post and reposting it each time — finding the image on my computer each time,” Denson told Marketing Land. “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,” Denson told Marketing Land.

Many marketers believe the update penalizes everyone for the crimes of a few. Twitter and its users would be better served if Twitter scrutinized individual accounts in a search for bots and spammers rather than implementing rules that impact all brands.

Twitter is eliminating fake bot accounts. A purge of thousands of suspected bots earlier this year caused some far right organizations to accuse Twitter of targeting them because of their political beliefs.

How PR and Marketing Pros Can Adapt

Instead of posting the same content to multiple accounts, Twitter recommends retweeting content from one account.

Tweet the update out on one core account, and then manually retweet it across secondary channels, recommends Serena Ehrlich, director, product marketing management at Business Wire. “Consider this update a terrific opportunity to create Tweets customized by each Twitter account’s intended audience,” Ehrlich writes. “Personalizing your tweets may take more time but it also increases the possibility of engagement and retweets.”

Scrutinize automated tools you use to ensure you are not simultaneously sharing any single tweet across multiple accounts, she adds.

Retweet only from a small number of accounts that you directly control, Roth warns. Twitter forbids bulk, aggressive, or very high-volume automated retweeting.

End – or at least curtail, automated employee advocacy programs. “If you’ve been encouraging your employees to tweet about your company’s content, and you’ve been giving them all a pre-formatted tweet to just paste into their social media feeds, that has to stop,” says Pam Neely at whatagraph.com. Encourage employees to compose their own tweets or ask them to change or add to preformatted tweets.

Twitter does not define “substantially similar,” Neely notes. Marketers may write substantially different tweets by including:

• A different image
• A unique tracking code
• Different hashtags
• A few unique words.

“I’d say that if you have any two of those four things different across every tweet, you’re probably okay,” she says.

Bottom Line: Many marketing and PR professionals will need to adjust their tactics following Twitter’s restriction against posting the same content to multiple accounts. Social media marketing may become more time consuming.