I sometimes hear folks talk about how they like to re-post a tweet from the morning again in the afternoon, just in case someone missed the message before.
Don't do that.
It's against Twitter's Terms of Service, and they consider it spam. If you're scanning Twitter's TOS, you might miss it, cause it's just a quick bullet point:
- "If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account."
Twitter reached out to the SocialOomph service this week to remind them that repeated tweets are against the rules -- they add to the clutter and won't be tolerated. If you haven't heard of SocialOomph before, it's a tool that lets you set your tweets to be sent at specific times, track keywords, or use other tools that Niala and I are not fond of -- like auto direct messages. (Robots are bad netiquette!) One of those services was to auto repeat your earlier tweet.
Here's what Twitter said to SocialOomph, according to SocialOomph's blog:
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.
So SocialOomph is taking off the feature starting Thursday.
There's enough noise already on Twitter. If you really need to get the word out about something and want to send it twice, make the effort to give it a different spin the second or third time around. Don't annoy your followers with an echo of your earlier posts.



If you send out a Tweet and you have no followers, will anyone hear it?
Posted by: Twitter | October 15, 2009 at 12:41 AM
tweet tweet -- whoops! That was twice, wasn't it??!
Posted by: AJA BROOKS | October 16, 2009 at 10:17 PM
Omygosh, so many people were tweeting all at once I kept seeing the whale yesterday, so I didn't hardly use it today. They're too busy tweeting to read your article! LOL
Posted by: THE PHOENIX | October 21, 2009 at 04:13 PM