Twitter vs Spam: A few bad apples spoil the lot.

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I am going to start this post off with how I feel personally about the enforcement of the no recurring tweet rule from twitter. Last night I went to my Socialoomph account to write up a scheduled tweet. I was alarmed to see a lot of tweets surrounded in a light red box with this message :

This tweet was not published. This recurring tweet has been deactivated. Please see our blog post at http://www.socialoomphblog.com/recurring-tweets/ for more information.

My first reaction was WTF? Then I proceeded to Socialoomph’s blog and read all the comments left on the post. So many people were very upset, like their whole business just collapsed. Given the time of day that I read this (10:30pm) I decided to sleep on it before I posted my feelings to to the world. I am glad that I did. My post if done last night would have come from a selfish perspective. I was able to step back and look at the whole picture. Although I used the recurring tweet feature to make sure all of my followers were kept up to date with our latest blog posts at SuperHero Marketing and to post valuable marketing tips. There were far too many true spammers pushing porn, miracle drugs, and many other no-value products. For the record we have promoted a “product” ourselves recently in twitter. It is for someone selling those “talking models” that hover over your site and deliver a sales or information message. I still think they are really cool. That is the only “product” we have pushed directly with our twitter account and that was as a test.

If you look at this from the perspective of Twitter, they were in serious danger of being overrun by spammers. Too much spam and you lose the people the site was intended for. Plus, Twitter is still looking for a monetization strategy and has investors chomping at the bit for results. They had to do something and stopping recurring tweets certainly puts a damper on spammers. That being said this does put a hurt on true content creators to get there message out. Many of us have many followers around the world and in different time zones. It will be much harder for us to reach as many people as we would like to. One of the most heralded tweeters out @guykawasaki used recurring tweets. I will be interested in his reaction to this if he has one.

So what do I think happens next? Twitter will have less Spam (Yeah!) and the amount of people on twitter may drop. Most of those lost will be spammers but unfortunately many of them could be content creators who do not believe they have the resources (time or money) to get their message out effectively with Twitter without the help of automated recurring tweets.

Now let’s take yet another step back and not forget the world was still spinning before Twitter cut out recurring tweets. As business owners we need to adapt with technology. Twitter is just one of many tools at our disposal. The greatest tool we have is our minds, continue to use that to think of new and creative ways to grow your business. My message to twitter: You broke my heart a little but I still love you! Twitter can still be used effectively to build your brand. SuperHero Marketing’s Top Secret Twitter Traffic Guide is filled with  tips on how to use Twitter to grow your business!