Twitter Tag Use and Tweet Scheduling for Writers: Accidental Misuse is Too Easy
When I was first learning to use Twitter, I found a master list of 140 hashtags for writers: it was a goldmine! In it were tags such as #mywana, #nanowrimo, #row80 and #writemotivation. In my ignorance I thought that those were simply tags you freely placed on posts, so they would grab the attention of readers in those areas. I messed up. These are community tags which should not have been used that way. I should have researched each of these tags properly before use. I had placed myself at risk of being reported for spam and being liberally blocked.
I received this wake-up call when I found this post on Twitter this week.
If a tag belongs to a community, you do not use it for promotion. If you do, you are spamming. That is against Twitter rules. It is also deeply offensive to that writing Community.
I have just spent a crazy amount of time going through my scheduled posts removing all offending tags. On thinking and reading further, I realised that there were other Twitter spam areas I was bordering on:
Putting out a majority of posts that had urls in them and weren’t person to person contact.
Excessive retweeting: which I do as I pass on resources for writers, that is what I am all about. However, that is also what the spammers do and can be seen as suspicious.
Bulk unfollowing of people. I had unfollowed several hundred the other day who weren’t following me, just to keep my stream manageable. If you do that too often, you call negative attention to yourself. Again, it’s a “fishing” spammer technique.
Twitter is serious about this. I went looking for tweet schedule services during the weekend, so I could better organise my feed by covering all time zones. (Being in Australia has some disadvantages). This is what I found:
Other nasties I am seeing coming up in my new “followers” are people setting up multiple Twitter accounts and posting the same posts to them all. I see the spammers do this a lot and have recently seen writers do it, in the names of their book characters. I try and check all new followers to eliminate these accounts. You can be reported for spam.
I personally believe automation should have limits. I find it downright rude when I receive a direct message from someone I have just followed saying “thanks for the follow, we followed you through auto-followback” or whatever they use. I know I am now part of their numbers game. They have never visited my profile and they don’t know I exist.
Let’s get back to what this is all about: making connections with real people.
Please note that the only one of those tags whose community I don’t follow is #writemotivation. I have been involved with, supportive of and interacting with the others. That is still no excuse. My sincere apologies to the members of those communities if I have offended them.
Here is a direct link to the Twitter rules relating to what I am sharing with you. Please make sure you don’t fall foul of them by mistake. http://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-violations/topics/236-twitter-rules-policies/articles/18311-the-twitter-rules
Filed under: Writing Resources Tagged: automation, block, blog, communities, duty of care, hastag, misuse, mywana, Nanowrimo, penalties, promotion, respect, ROW80, rules, scheduling, spam, Twitter, warning, Writemotivation, writers, writing
