How will Twitters Updated Terms of Service affect Virtual Assistants? This was a question I recently posed to Andy from ContentCal. Andy kindly recommended I share the following blog post with you. It is a post that was originally shared on their own blog, but the information is current and balanced hence sharing it with their full permission here:
Looks like Twitter’s making some changes…
If you’ve been keeping an eye on the news, you’ll know that as of February 2018, Twitter announced it’s grand masterplan to stop spammy tweets and artificial messaging, once and for all.
Here’s the scoop:
No more duplicate content across multiple accounts
Twitter’s stopping it’s users from posting identical or ‘substantially similar’ content across multiple Twitter accounts. Those of you who might want to post about Pancake Day, for example, across multiple business pages or client accounts, will no longer be able to do so.
On the flip side, those who want to use Twitter for ‘seedier purposes’ (by which we mean false promo), will no longer be able to schedule tweets that rave about their products or services, later to publish from several fake profiles.
No more duplicate content across the same account
However, the new TOS don’t just apply to duplication across multiple profiles. In an attempt to stop spam tweeting, Twitter is also preventing users from posting the same content on their own account. This is something in particular that users will need to be aware of when it comes to duplicate @ mentions, replies, or just stand alone content.
No more simultaneous bulk actions such as liking, retweeting, or following from multiple accounts
And finally, Twitter will also be stopping bulk actions across multiple accounts. When we consider how many businesses are creating fake accounts to automatically like and retweet their content, it’s not hard to understand why Twitter has introduced this rule.
Those who make use of community management tools will likely see some changes in regards to carrying out bulk actions across multiple accounts in direct response to this update.
And us? Here’s ContentCal’s reaction
We’re keeping our ‘Re-Use Post’ feature
While our initial first thought was to remove our ‘re-use post’ button to avoid duplicate Twitter content, with more thought and discussion around our current workflow for content creation, we decided against this change. We’re aware that a number of our users duplicate content to be edited and changed before publication, and we wanted to maintain this flexibility of use.
However, our best advice for those who re-use content is to work from a planning perspective only, keeping the finalised content as original as possible.
