Social Media Specialists have been up in arms over Twitter taking away our ability to tweet from multiple accounts at once on Tweetdeck. Sometimes working for a media company means needing to post the same tweet to multiple accounts. For example, I work on a syndicated radio show, meaning our program plays live in multiple cities all at once. Some of those cities ask us to live the tweet the show to their followers from their accounts. I would use Tweetdeck to tweet to all the accounts all at one time.
Now Twitter is cracking down on spam and took that ability away from us. We have to individually select each account to tweet from. That may not seem like a HUGE deal, but when you have three minutes to tweet something to 15 different accounts , you can get a little stressed.
Twitter has been cracking down on their rules after groups of people were selling tweets for large accounts. Seems like a normal thing right? Not so much. There is a difference between this process known as "tweetdecking" and a promoted post. You see promoted and sponsored posts all over Twitter and Instagram. Even I have done them!
A company reached out to me, and I agreed to promote their products. Which is why you see the #ad and #spons at the end of a video. Tweetdecking isn't the same thing.
Tweetdecking is a group of users across a network that are paid to retweet tweets for an individual, company, or brand in order to make it go viral. This goes against Twitters terms of use, because when a post has been paid for, it has to be obvious. That's why you'll see #ad or #spons on some tweets fro your favorite celebrities.
Tweetdecking violates Twitters spam rules which clearly states that users cannot "sell, purchase, or attempt to artificially inflate account interactions."
Tweetdecking was also ultimately just accounts stealing tweets that could go viral. This is the reason you would see the same tweet with thousands of retweets from different accounts. In order to be apart of tweetdecking group, you had to have a large following, and companies would pay a group of people cash to retweet their post. So an account may see a tweet they liked, posted the same tweet to their account, and then paid a tweetdecking group to retweet it from them, rather than the account it natively came from.
Tweet plagerism has always been a thing. Popular parody accounts taking tweets from lesser known users, and tweeting it natively on their own accounts, usually resulting in thousands of retweets and likes, without any acknowledgement to original post.
Now Twitter has begun suspending these accounts. Users like @dory, @girlposts, and @commonwhitegirl have been taken down.
Whether or not these are permanent suspensions has yet to be seen. Most people are overjoyed at Twitter taking down these accounts, since most regular users of the site avoid these accounts at all costs.
What sucks is that for those of us who were using Tweetdeck for its intended purpose are being punished. My job has been made 100x harder for not allowing us to tweet from multiple accounts at once. PLEASE TWITTER, allow media brands to apply for this feature. I am fully behind you cracking down on spam, but punishing us for something we were not doing really isn't fun!
The term Tweetdecking was first broken by BuzzFeed News back in January.
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Note: I just want to use this chance to let people know, whenever you see me personally sponsor a product, I would never use something I didn't believe in. I never tell you to use a product I wasn't using myself every day! I have turned down shady companies before asking me to endorse their products on my social channels.