Keeping up-to-date with Twitter’s posting rules

Twitter can be a very powerful channel for your organisation to increase awareness and engagement. However, you need to follow the latest updates to make sure you keep up with their rules.

Twitter is trying to protect its users by spammers and negative messages so they are presenting in detail all the rules and how to stay safe from unexpected problems.

In order to help you make the most of the channel and its use through the Lightful platform, we’ve created some guidelines on how to use Twitter while adhering to its rules.

If you want to avoid seeing your account marked as spam or blocked, especially when using a social media scheduling platform, here are four main things you need to consider.

Number of mentions

Try not to mention other people too many times from your account. A post that includes, for example, six @mentions to other accounts might be considered as spam. Also, if you’re mentioning the same person more than four-five times during one day might be seen as an attempt to grab their attention in a spamming way. Of course, if you want to mention someone you already know, there won’t be any problem. So try to find a balance in your mentions and the way you’re using them.

Number of hashtags

There is not a limitation in the number of hashtags that you can use in your own tweets. However, if you use too many hashtags in a row in just one tweet, your post will lose its context.

If you keep using, e.g. 10 hashtags on every post, Twitter users might find your posts as an attempt to grab their attention so the engagement might not be good.

You can aim at 2-3 hashtags on every tweet to ensure that you’re focusing on the actual content of your tweet to be as engaging and relevant as possible.

Frequency of posting

You can post and schedule several tweets at different times of the day. A good practice when scheduling your content is to ensure that the tweets are not published almost at the same time. You can schedule one tweet at 10.10, but it’s probably better to schedule the next one at least after 10.15.

This way, you are increasing your chances of engagement.

Posting too many tweets at the same time, for example, five tweets in 10 minutes, might be considered a spamming activity so make sure you’re allocating some time between your tweets.

Scheduling the same tweet again

It’s easier to copy-paste a tweet to reschedule it in the future, but Twitter is not favouring this option anymore. This means that you can’t copy-paste and schedule the exact same tweet multiple times. All social media management platforms have now disabled this option to avoid seeing their users marked as spam. If you try to schedule the same tweet again through Lightful, you will see a message that encourages you to slightly change the message before scheduling it.

Twitter wants to prevent suspicious and possibly spam activities so you can simply avoid having any problems with your account by creating a different variation of your tweet.

Overview – what you need to avoid

• Mentioning the same person too many times during the day
• Mentioning too many people in one post (especially if you don’t regularly engage with them)
• Posting too many tweets at the same time
• Scheduling too many tweets in short periods
• Trying to reschedule a tweet with the exact same copy that you’ve used before

These changes may seem disruptive for all of us when we’re trying to save time, but they are actually good news. Twitter is encouraging all of us to be more creative and authentic. They are also trying to control the misuse of their platform so it should be a good move for all of us!

Are you having further questions about Twitter? Tweet us at @lightful!

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