Engagement – Anti-Spam Best Practices

Twitter has rules about user behaviour and automatically detects certain actions as possible spamming. If this happens your account may be temporarily locked or even permanently suspended.

If your account has a temporary problem then you may need to re-establish the connection between your Audiense account and Twitter.

Avoid accidental spamming

The best way to avoid problems is to be less aggressive, more targeted, personalise and follow the best practices outlined below. We recommend that you read the following posts to help clarify Twitter’s position:

• The Twitter Rules
• Following Rules and Best Practices
• Twitter Limits

Audiense has certain engagement tools which allow you to ‘semi-automate’ actions such as sending Tweets, replies, mentions, DMs, etc. If you use the tools responsibly they will not cause any problem but their aggressive overuse could create problems. If there are no other spam related issues then you may be exceeding one of the limits that Twitter controls, so please take into account the anti-spam best practices for the following tools.

Mention Helper best practices

Mention Helper allows you to quickly add multiple users to a Tweet with a single click so it should be used responsibly.

• Send no more than 10 consecutive Tweets to ensure compliance with Twitter’s rules.
• Modify the messages to avoid sending exactly the same text to many users.
• Maximum of 2400 Tweets (including Retweets) per day, but spread across 24 hours. This daily limit is further broken down into smaller limits for half-hourly intervals (more or less 50 per half hour).

Rule builder best practices

Rule Builder specifies actions you want to perform automatically based on predetermined criteria. Rules you can apply are:

• Add users to a list.
• Add a tag to their profile.
• Mention in a Tweet.
• Send an email to yourself.

Remember that you may be exceeding a limit because of an automated rule you have set in Rule Builder in combination with other activity.

• Use the “apply the rule to all users regardless of criteria” option very sparingly as such a wide filter can mean you send too many DMs, Tweets, add too many people to a list, or receive too many emails in your inbox.
• Apply restrictive filters so that you don’t perform an automated action for a huge amount of users.

Lists best practices

The lists function allows you to quickly add individual or multiple users to an existing or new list so it should be used responsibly.

• Be careful when adding multiple users to a list. Twitter monitors the number of users added in batches so limit the number of users added at one time to a sensible amount or all of them may not be added.
• A maximum of 5000 users permitted per list. (by Twitter).
• A maximum of 1000 lists permitted per user. (by Twitter).

Follow mode best practices

Follow mode allows you to quickly follow/unfollow individual users with a single click so it should be used responsibly. Twitter has always had rules and limits about following on Twitter. We, as a Twitter partner, are totally compliant with their rules and we always recommend to our users some best practices in order to avoid breaking Twitter rules.

What are the technical follow limits?

• We don’t limit the number of accounts you can follow overall, but there are some limits as to the pace at which you can do so.
• Every Twitter account is able to follow up to 400 accounts per day. Verified Twitter accounts are able to follow up to 1,000 accounts per day.
• In addition to the daily limits, there are follow ratios that go into effect once you’re following a certain number of accounts:
  • Every Twitter account can follow up to 5,000 accounts. Once you reach that number, you may need to wait until your account has more followers before you can follow additional accounts. 
  • This number is different for each account and is automatically calculated based on your unique ratio of followers to following.

To paraphrase Einstein, remember that by repeating the same unsuitable engagement tactics over and over again you cannot expect any different results, i.e. you will continue having problems with Twitter authentication if you break their rules, so it’s in your best interests to follow the above anti-spam recommendations.