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Recurring Tweets On Twitter Accounts Are Being Discontinued

by Michael Gass on 10/13/2009 09:35 25 comments , 13656 views
Categories: Marketing
Tags: twitter, social oomph

On Monday, October 12th, 2009, Twitter communicated that recurring tweets are in violation of their Terms of Service. Twitter’s rationale centered around the potential for recurring tweets to result in duplicate tweets.

From Twitter … Recurring Tweets are a violation no matter how they are done, including whether or not someone pays you to have a special privilege. We don’t want to see any duplicate tweets whatsoever- They pollute Twitter, and tools shouldn’t be given to enable people to break the rules. Spinnable text seems to just be a way to bypass the rules against duplicate updates and essentially provides the same problems.

For those of you using services such as Social Oomph (previously named Tweetlater), you can still schedule tweets for a specific day/time, just not recurring Tweets.

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# | by Brian Fanslau on October 13 2009, 13:54

Awesome! Twitter will be much more productive for the people that actually want to have good conversations without so many spam tweets in between.

# | by Cameron on October 13 2009, 15:05

Personally, I feel this is a little close-minded/restrictive of Twitter. Although I can see their point, there is value in repeating tweets at certain times of the day (I've heard 3-odd times, with about 4-6hours apart) to catch the widest range of people. Because of it's international nature, timezones, and when people are on, obviously plays a big part in who sees your tweet, and being able to resend the same tweet spread over the day, or gradually over a few days, can actually be a good thing. Do you know how this is meant to affect retweets (which to some degree, is essentially the same concept, the content is the same, it's just sent from different people)? I think this is a bad move on twitter's part. Cut down on spammers, I'm all for that - especially those that send the same message to 400-odd people, but there's a big difference between those and people resending a specific post 3 or 4 times over the course of a few hours or days.

# | by Scott Allen on October 13 2009, 16:46

Yes, this is a little close-minded/restrictive of Twitter. For example, I have a set of about 3 tweets on a 2-week cycle saying something about a cause I believe in. I will tweet about it anyway -- all I'm doing is saving myself a little bit of time by automating it. I agree with preventing spam. I agree with preventing people from doing humanly unreasonable things. However, I think letting people gain a little bit of efficiency by automating something they do anyway is reasonable. Now I have to set an Outlook reminder to go tweet about "X". How does that serve anybody???

# | by Ian on October 13 2009, 19:32

This instantly kills repeater services like SocialOomph's business model, and is a bit daft by Twitter to not state what is a duplicate Tweet. For instance, many post "Just got into the office, having a coffee." If I post this once now, does that mean that I can never ever post that again? The new rules would seem to suggest this would fall foul, and hence I will have to find 365days*X years of things to do getting into the office in the morning. Logically, if you think about the memory needed to store every tweet ever sent, Twitter must have an "OK to repeat limit," they are just not releasing it. At some point, someone will figure it out, and post it on Social Media, and the whole world will invent X versions of the same message. If they laid in some sensible rules, this is a win-win for twitter - but the way this has come in, this could have a horrible social backlash!

# | by steve on October 13 2009, 21:20

Twitter has really dropped the ball this time. This is just the kind of move that will cause people to leave this service. There have been a series of egregious actions against the development and user community by Twitter and this is just one more. It is akin to censorship. What about all those people who have spent thousands and thousands of hours and 10's of thousands of dollars building software applications to automate business communications through Twitter.

There are just so many things wrong with this decision that I can't even finish my thoughts.

Its a sad day.

# | by singlepayer on October 14 2009, 00:04

Well I have to admit, I'm kind of confused here with this. You mean the RT command is no longer usable? Huh? Or am I not getting this? People's quoting someone and "re-tweeting" it to me has been one of the ways that I was able to learn about new people and resources that have been so useful and funny and interesting. Maybe I'm not getting this. Wish the focus might have been on the trashing and spamming up of Twitter with all of the idiotic sex/junk mail type tweets auto-tweeting themselves... ugh, THAT has been a real pain.

# | by Vladimir Ghetau on October 14 2009, 12:29

I'm just curious what is the source of this information, I want to see what else came with it. Thanks! Vlad

# | by Neicole Crepeau on October 14 2009, 13:07

Twitter is nuts to take this stance. I love Twitter, but are they ~~idiots~~ crazy? They apparently haven't looked at their own user data, their market, or their competition. And blocking recurring tweets is directly in opposition to their stated goal of being a friendly and valuable place for businesses. I just blogged all the data and reasons why I think they are crazy.

"Dear Twitter, please don't kill your market" http://bit.ly/1N5AHA

# | by James Eliason on October 14 2009, 13:17

This is something that I disagree with. Controlling SPAM'rs who send out the same message from multiple fake accounts, linking to crap is one thing. Scheduling same Tweets (maybe 3) over the course of 7 days is a whole different ballgame. Twitter is thinking very Micro here, you have to think Macro with a service like Twitter. Not every single follower of an account sees the Tweet at the exact same time. Not everyone has their Twitter account "open" all day long. This is further complicated by the limiting of RT's that show up in our streams. As a example, I login to my Twitter account at 8:00 a.m. check back a few pages of Tweets. Log off. I log back in at 10:00, am I not going to be shown RT's from people I am following at 10:00 because that same content was posted at 9:00 a.m. when I wasnt on Twitter? Twitter needs to take a moment and think about these 2 processes. And how ultimately they will decrease the traffic to sites like Techcrunch and Mashable. Both have a RT button, and in all instances hitting the RT button will more than likely get you removed from Twitter.

# | by Dan London on October 14 2009, 14:16

Interesting. I know Guy Kawasaki uses the Tweet same link every 8 hours approach...

# | by Voice As A Weapon on October 14 2009, 15:50

Uhhh, isn't that one of the reasons we got on Twitter? To post and repost to a larger community. I don't need a Twitter account to have a conversation. I have real people for that. I have Twitter to get my message out, numerous time.

# | by Neicole Crepeau on October 14 2009, 16:44

Had a second thought on this. Perhaps Twitter is banning recurring tweets as a precursor for charging for the same service. Either by charging for advertising or offering recurring tweets as part of the premium business accounts it has discussed. See http://bit.ly/3oSQTB

# | by Brenna on October 14 2009, 16:47

Why do I have the feeling this is going to back fire and make users very unhappy?

# | by Shani on October 14 2009, 17:06

Is this RTing that your talking about? or Something like this #scrappers .

# | by Deborah on October 14 2009, 17:15

What's their definition of a recurring tweet? Is it an exact duplicate (letter for letter), or an identical URL but different wording? Very few viewers read every tweet and rarely go back in time once it's beyond a page of tweets to view past ones so it's more likely that your one tweet is never seen. It's also a standard strategy to tweet multiple variations of the same topic to hit different time zones especially for promoting activity at an event. I don't see this eliminating the kind of tweets I find very annoying.

# | by Theresa on October 14 2009, 19:23

Do I understand right that Twitter is not blocking either scheduled Tweets, or multiple tweets on the same topic? Makes more work, but if you re-word your message, you should still be able to get your message out multiple times over the course of the day - no?

# | by Frederick Griffin on October 14 2009, 21:16

Ebay made a similar mistake under CEO John Donaho:
"Kill off the Flea Market Sellers, and cater to Big Companies". It did not work.

Donaho failed to recognize that those Mom and Pop Sellers were also the Buyers. Ebay's profits have suffered accordingly, as the "Small Sellers and Buyers" have left Ebay in droves.

Twitter is making the same blunder, and Yahoo sees an opportunity.
Yahoo has opened its Twitter Clone, "Meme", to anyone that wants to join. They have opened their API to developers.

Yahoo Meme allows up to 2000 Characters (vs. Twitter's 140), plus Music, plus Video, plus Photos, none of which Twitter offers.

Also, there is no limit to the number of Followers. Given the number of Servers that Yahoo owns, it is unlikely they will reach Capacity (which has brought Twitter to its knees, and forced them to cap new accounts at 2000 Follows).

Right now Meme has few participants. It has a lot of "noise" coming from photographers who post large pics. But time will tell.

* You may want to "claim your name" on Meme while you can. *

Thanks for the great post Neicole!

# | by Priya Florence Shah on October 15 2009, 01:15

I agree with Twitter's policy. All you have to do when you want to repeat a link is change the text around a bit. Get more creative. The biggest sin online is to be boring.

# | by Daniel on October 15 2009, 03:09

How does all this effect Retweets? Are they not duplicate tweets? I must say this is all as clear as mud right now and I don't really understand the Twitters true definition of a recurring tweet... :(

# | by Lareen Strong on October 15 2009, 12:16

I applaud this action. I am interested in interacting with others, not being spammed by being shown the same link by the same person multiple times. Conversation, not spam.

# | by Katie Ingraham on October 16 2009, 13:31

I semi-agree with this, but how will Twitter regulate it? Do they count it as spam if you post the same link more than once within a specific time frame? Its beneficial for me to push tweets out at various times of the day depending on where my audience is geographically. If you have thousands of followers, do you expect to push out ONE tweet at noon EST and expect your followers to catch it? Hardly.

# | by Phyllis Twombly on October 16 2009, 21:10

I think this particular issue should be left up to Twitter users to police themselves. I already block anyone who sends me duplicate tweets if they're not what I want and don't appear to be some kind of technical glitch. One thing that should be a huge concern is that sometimes other apps contribute to repeated tweets even the sender wasn't expecting.

I'd prefer to see Twitter automatically delete users who are openly offensive. I don't care about your 'exploits' and I don't want to see nudity in your photo. I've blocked every single one of those that came my way.

# | by Ted Weir on October 18 2009, 12:07

I thought that tweeters could block those we do not want to read... surely this can be modified to allow users to controls multiple repeat tweets.

# | by mzah b on October 23 2009, 21:18

I don't agree with this terms. This will ignore the good readers and followers who had left the message behind.

http://ipt.my

# | by Tony on November 03 2009, 17:11

The only way to solve this problem is to voice our opinions. "Change it back... ALLOW RECURRING TWEETS!"

...gunna tweet this until my account gets suspended

Tony

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