No more daily tweets…

Twitter recently announced a change in its rules regarding posting duplicate content. Designed to reduce the amount of spam and ‘bots’ on the platform, the new terms of service stop people sending duplicate tweets from multiple accounts, and also put limitations on ‘recycling’ tweets (posting duplicate content multiple times on a single account).

How does this affect competitions?

The Twitter automation rules state that “You may not post duplicative or substantially similar Tweets on one account”.

Gleam and Rafflecopter widgets have always included a ‘daily tweet’ option,  allowing entrants to visit a blog/website every day, tweet the same content and gain an extra entry in a prize draw for doing so.

If you enter competitions using the Gleam platform, you’ll see that the ‘daily tweet’ option has already been removed. Gleam integrates with Twitter’s API (the API allows a user to complete a Twitter action without leaving the Gleam widget) – and because of this integration, Gleam could be at risk if they don’t comply with the rules.

Rafflecopter, on the other hand, doesn’t use Twitter’s API – for a Rafflecopter giveaway, a pre-typed tweet appears, but the entrant still has to click to send it themselves. It remains to be seen whether Rafflecopter will remove the ‘daily tweet’ option from the platform.

The daily tweet has never been a great idea from the entrant’s point of view, as Twitter often ‘shadowbans‘ or filters out tweets from users who are sending out spam – and this type of repetitive action is often flagged as spam.

So if the daily tweet is a no-no, what tasks can bloggers and promoters include in their giveaway widgets to get entrants back for a daily visit?

• Free daily bonus entry – this is the easiest option, with entrants simply having to click to register a bonus entry (a bonus entry task is available on Gleam, but on Rafflecopter it will need to be added as a custom task)
• Comment on a blog post – ask entrants to leave a comment each day on any other blog post (ask them to copy and paste a link to the blog post in the widget – as this is time consuming, weight the task accordingly)
• Share a photo – ask entrants to share a new photo on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook each day for a bonus entry (this is quite a lot of effort for entrants though – and can only be done using Gleam)

A ‘daily entry’ option can be added to any custom task on Gleam or Rafflecopter – for example, asking entrants to visit a web page or blog post, or answer a question.

Tweetdeck changes

Twitter’s Tweetdeck software used to be able to send exactly the same tweet from multiple accounts at once – which made it easy for someone to cheat in a competition by retweeting from lots of accounts at once! The good news is that, due to the new Twitter rules, this is no longer allowed:

“Users of TweetDeck will no longer be able to select multiple accounts through which to perform an action such as Tweeting, Retweeting, liking, or following’

This is definitely a change worth celebrating – there has been much frustration in the past where serial cheats (sometimes with 100+ accounts) have won multiple prizes in the same ‘Follow & RT’ giveaway!

Tips

For compers – keep your account safe from deactivation or filtering by tweeting regular, original content – don’t tweet too many times with the same competition hashtag or send duplicate tweets.

For bloggers – schedule shares of your blog post links using different copy in your tweets, and try to cut down on the automation! Add a ‘bonus daily entry’ task to your giveaways to replace the daily tweet option – or how about adding a daily entry for people visiting your Giveaways category?

Let’s hope these rule changes will see less spam across Twitter – and fewer compers suffering a shadowban!