Next time you think about sending out a tweet that is identical to one that you just sent out several hours ago, you may want to reconsider. Twitter, which was far more lax about duplicate tweets in the past, is now putting its foot down.
What’s the Problem?
All scheduled tweets that are identical, no matter if they are sent five minutes or five hours apart, do not get tweeted.
What’s the Solution?
As Twitter continues to clamp down on identical tweets, content marketers now have a greater responsibility to actually read the blog posts that they create and promote.
To illustrate the effect of this problem on content marketing , I’ll use an example.
One of my colleagues Jeannie Walters just wrote a great blog post about five social media predictions for the rest of the year. After finishing the article, say I decide to post the following tweet,
5 Social Media Predictions for the Rest of 2014 via @jeanniecw http://bit.ly/1A332pc #smclub #socialmedia
Let’s just say I want to help her out even more and, a few hours later, I decide to post the exact same tweet. With Twitter’s new rules in place, my second tweet would be “banned” and wouldn’t even go out.
If I wanted to send out similar tweets about her post, I would need to come up with some alternative text so that Twitter doesn’t flag it as identical.
Some alternative tweets could be,
What should community managers be called? “5 Social Media Predictions for the Rest of 2014 via @jeanniecw http://bit.ly/1A332pc #smclub #social media
If content is king, the mobile is queen. “5 Social Media Predictions for the Rest of 2014” via @jeanniecw http://bit.ly/1A332pc
Although these new rules are somewhat of a hassle to follow, content marketers do not need to fret. The solution to this problem, as shown above, is not rocket science. Content marketers need to simply read the content deep enough, so that they can create alternative tweets.
What are your thoughts about Twitter being stricter about duplicate tweets? Like them? Hate them?