Fake accounts. Bots. Russian election meddling. Hate speech. Spam. Yup, it’s clear that Twitter has its share of problems. But good news for Twitter users everywhere: Twitter is taking action to make the network a better experience for all of us.
“Information will now be more clearly linked back to a source, and more Tweets will be coming from official channels.”
Kudos to Twitter for announcing these major steps to help reduce several of these problems, taking effect on March 23rd, 2018. Legitimate Twitter users should have nothing to fear, but you will need to plan on a few changes:
- Expect significant updates from your social media tools providers. Twitter’s API and development partners are scrambling to update their tools and their software to comply with these changes by March 23rd. Undoubtedly, this will result in UI and other changes to your publishing or other tools.
- Stop Tweeting identical or very similar content from multiple accounts. Twitter’s new policy here makes sense given their situation, but it does mean that some legitimate users (e.g. multi-location businesses) will need to make updates. Have a restaurant chain and making a menu update? You will be violating Twitter’s new policy if they all individually Tweet out the same update, even if it’s not at the same time. Thankfully, there’s a good and simple solution: have each location Retweet the news/announcement from a corporate Twitter account. You might need to adjust your process, and it might even be a bit more work, but we believe this is the right move for Twitter: Information will now be more clearly linked back to a source, and more Tweets will be coming from official channels.
- No more taking action from multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. Yes, we’ll actually need to follow and Retweet from accounts individually. This will better align actions on Twitter with actual intent and interest, making the reactions you do receive on your content much more likely to be legitimate.
