[Update: Recurring Tweets are Back! We have been working with Twitter to get the go-ahead to turn recurring tweets back on. We received confirmation today (12/04/09) and will be turning recurring tweets back on in the coming days. Stay Tuned!]
In recent weeks we have been in contact with Twitter over their rumored decision to recognize “recurring” tweets as SPAM.
While the vast majority of our users use this feature for legitimate business and personal reasons, we have decided to comply with Twitter’s request to remove the feature. This in no way affects the ability to “schedule” tweets with TwAitter. The scheduling functionality will remain and has been deemed by Twitter to be a legitimate feature.
TwAitter is recognized throughout the industry as an essential tool for businesses, government, and organizations on Twitter. We’ve received “Top 5″ and “best in class” ratings from several publications and TwAitter’s acclaimed Twitter Business Tool Suite will continue to provide the tools you need to get the most for your business on Twitter.
Solutions / Alternatives
Good
Though “recurring” messages are not allowed, TwAitter offers a unique feature that will still be in effect to aid users who often send tweets with “similar” content. Once a tweet is sent through TwAitter it is permanently stored and able to be “copied” by clicking the “copy” button in the Scheduled Messages page. This sets up a new tweet with the same text and time as the previous. It is against Twitter’s TAC’s to send the same tweet again. This feature is merely present to give users an easy way to post a tweet that needs to go out at a similar time and that has some text that you wish to reuse.
Bad
For those users who wish to find a way around this rule to continue using an application that provides true “recurring” messages, there are no legitimate options. Twitter has also deemed “spinners” as in violation of their terms and conditions. This practice of programatically modifying a tweet using predefined lists of alternating words has been expressly forbidden as an option. TwAitter has never offered this feature, but many users have requested it and we will be unable to add it. All applications that implement this practice of “spinning” must cease and turn off the feature. All applications that offer “recurring” tweets must turn off this feature.
As a result, we do not advise our customers that use recurring messages to seek out such a solutions. Any users found to send duplicate tweets will be candidates for suspension from Twitter and we want to ensure that none of our customers are subjected to this.
Effective Date
As of Wednesday, November 3rd at 12:00 AM, the recurring tweets feature on TwAitter will be turned off permanently. Any recurring tweets already scheduled for the following week will continue to send until Monday, November 8th at 12:00 AM. At that time all recurring tweets will be automatically set to “paused” and the software that facilitates the sending of recurring messages will be turned off.
Still your Favorite Twitter Business Tool
TwAitter is a proud member of the Twitter application community and wishes to always adhere to Twitter’s terms and conditions. Our team of developers is hard at work adding new features every day. The recurring tweets feature was a small part of our growing list of Twitter tools and it goes without saying that TwAitter still remains the place to tweet when Twitter means Business!
We invite you to express your opinions on this change by commenting on this post below.
Ryan Bell
President
TwAitter.com
http://twaitter.com
Infact what your telling me is under the new rules twitter has lost there mind in thinking in todays world people especially in the marketing world have the time to sit in front of there computer for 24 hours a day to send out tweets. There is nothing hopeful or helpful about this. It seems that Twitter has everybodys head in a noose. And for the couple of bad doers out there, their making everyone else pay. This is an OUTRAGE! it seems that twitter is changing rules like people change their underware.
Give the ‘copy’ feature a try. We think you’ll find it the best (and “only”) available option for sending recurring-like tweets in Twitter.
Ryan
Too bad for twitter that they do not understand the broadcast business. TV has been repeating shows for 70 years, Cable repeats shows within same day. Advertisers play same commercials five times during one show. Clearly twitter is not for marketers – i am guessing twitter would like to be a public forum for losers and Freud’s descendants. Ciao for now twitter. BTW, ironically, people seemed to enjoy our broadcast schedule as the re-tweets were plenty and we were ranked top twitter every week by traveltuesday.org. Got to love this billion dollar biz model jokers.
Nicerose,
Twitter backed down on this and allowed us to turn it back on early this year.
Thanks,
Ryan
This is a major, and disappointing setback. If Twitter thinks a tweet is only good once I think they misunderstand the beauty of twitter. Out of my over 4,000 followers only 20% might be on Twitter when my tweet goes out, and probably only about 10 people will actually see it before it disappears on their stream.
I’m glad when occasionally I happen to see people I follow tweet the same tweets; often I didn’t have time to really read it well the 1st time, or visit the link in the tweet. Re-Tweeting your own tweets from time to time makes perfect sense. Just like a TV channel repeating shows, movies, and commercials; over time.
Automating this makes perfect sense, it adds to the content I can offer my followers, and for those I follow it helps insure that I will see their Tweets on a more regular basis; thus keeping me more connected to, and familiar with, them.
The recurring feature is/was one of the best and most practical, and helpful, features of Twaittor.
So so so so TRUE. Got to love business made by engineers for engineers rather than understanding how service serves needs of users – another dot boom example.
“”Out of my over 4,000 followers only 20% might be on Twitter when my tweet goes out, and probably only about 10 people will actually see it before it disappears on their stream.”"
Is it possible that twitter would consider allowing recurring tweets on a monthly basis? That frequency of twits with same message should not be considered spam. If you select to follow someone’s tweets, how can those messages be considered unsolicited spam? The new policy should be relaxed somewhat in my opinion.
Thanks for recommending the alternative.
Regards,
Keith
We recommended that they relax the requirements to allow monthly and annual tweets. Twitter drew the line in the sand at zero-tolerance for any form or recurring tweet.
We will continue to lobby to turn the feature back on. We are considering turning it back on for ping.fm and facebook integration once those are completed.
Ryan
TwAitter
I can only hope that Twitter in the future will not be considered spam messages daily repetition.
There are lots of users who engage in advertising and other advertising programs. Will Twitter to download text advertising by thousands of users considered spam?
So, basically what they’re saying is that jerks with nothing better to do than bang out nonsense on their keyboards all day long, every day, without end get to use up all the “twitter space” while those of us with a point to make get the twitter whale or sent to twitter jail?
I didn’t really like twitter when I first used it. When, oh when, am I ever going to learn to trust my instincts. I have a recurring tweet, with links to explain it and everything, that some STILL do not get! Granted, it only goes out once a week. But you simply HAVE to repeat things to some people for it to ever register.
And the way I’m reading this, even if I manually copy and paste and retweet the same message I’ll be in violation of the TOS if I do not alter at least one letter.
Twitter started out as the slums of the internet and is only getting worse. Think I’ll pick up my marbles and go home.
Surely a tweet recurring once a month is OK – who looks back at tweets a month old? I have 101 craft tips I want to retweet a few a day, every month- most people won’t read back past the last 20.
Its taken me weeks to get this setup right on Twaitter, now wasted! Business doesn’t have time to re-work this sort of data every day. I’m providing useful content to Twitter, and twitter readers – where can I go to protest?
Where is the link on Twitter to make a direct protest?
If Twitter received even a few hundred protests from businesses, it must take notice- we are their potential revenue source, if we find it useless we’re not going to want to advertise on it. If we refuse to put content on it they’re not going to have anything to hang their advertising on…
Here is their GetSatisfaction Help System. This might be a good place to voice it: http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter
Correction: I meant to say about 2%, not 20%.
I think Twitter is trying to micromanage this way too much. People just won’t follow or they will unfollow people whose Tweets they don’t like, for whatever reasons; too many tweets, or too many similar ones.
Twitter mainly doesn’t want duplicate Tweets on a Tweeter’s timeline. If you try to post a Tweet the same as on on your TL, it will sometimes say “Duplicate Post”.
Since 20 Tweets are on a Timeline, Recurring tweets should
be allowed every 21 tweets.
Trying to be Tweet purists by saying that all tweets should be original is absurd, and a real waste of mmany great Tweets.
I think Twitter is actually more concerned with the drain on the servers with all the automated Tweets.
If people have to re-enter or reconfigure Tweets all the time to schedule them, there will be many less total tweets.
Out of my total tweets only 10-20% have been non-automated.
It took me several hours to enter about 150 recurring Tweets in TwAitter. I would go in every couple days and change the Time Zone. I was planning to go in and change most tweets over time continually to fresh material.
There’s no way I can spend several hours every week doing this.
Thank you for listening and doing your best to keep trying to deal with Twitter who “drew the line in the sand”.
twitter is a good platform for marketing. We made the experience that repeating tweets are better noticed. When Twitter will cancel this, we will search for another platform and cancel our membership at Twitter.
Thanks for the head-up of course nothing on the official twitter site -/.
This is really bad news it is/was one of my most helpful feature to manage tweeting (storing anniversaries, #FF, or linking to an updating status on blogs etc).
And i second my previouse poster, often tweets are getting lost in a busy time or even dont show up on the twitter follower stream, beside whats about all the API which picks up a tagged wording which could be scheduled to repeat links -(. It’s really backwards of technology thinking of them how twitter is used.
Thanks guys for all your great Twaitter work – keep it up.
It is sad that a feature that is being used for benign reasons by legitimate tweeters has been deemed as a spamming tool. The recurring feature lets us just send out simple tweets like Good Morning or Seasons greetings which would otherwise be an arduous task.
But I think Twaitter is still a wonderful tool despite the lack of recurring tweet feature. Wishing Twaitter all the very best!
We hope you will continue to find use with our service. Many new features are being added to continue to make Twaitter a great tool for business on Twitter
I too echo the frustration presented here by legitimate marketers. It is absolutely insane to phase the most important aspect of twittering out of existence.
Bottom line here is that the 20 minutes I spend in the morning setting up my tweets for the day I felt were already taking too much of my time. With this addition I may not be able to utilize twitter at all.
Like it was said before me: Only those with nothing else to do will be left on Twitter. Good luck to Twitter in trying to attract a business class of user.
I was recently introduced to another service much like Twitter but instead it caters to businesspeople and marketers.
You can find out more by going to
http://www.sokule.com/johnchatman
obviously this is an affiliate link which is actually part of the magic of this site since as it’s user base grows you can earn income through promoting it.
I would think that this particular site would be something that the Twaitter development team might look into developing an application for.
Here’s the link one more time:
http://www.sokule.com/johnchatman
Have a great day folks,
John
John, thx for the comments. We’ll continue to lobby Twitter to return the ability to do recurring. We do plan to bring back recurring for our Ping.fm integration which will allow you to post to an of 50+ social media applications (with the exception of Twitter) using our scheduling platform. This is due out very soon.
Ryan (twaitter)
Perhaps I just missed it, but Twitter’s TAC page doesn’t seem to explicitly say no recurring tweets. Could you please post the exact verbiage you’re referring to?
It does not say anything specific to applications providing recurring tweets. They are using a not-so-clear sentence to encompass ALL duplicate messages and ALL applications that make it easy to create duplicate messages. Its a stretch, but I think their goal was to enforce the ‘new’ decision about applications not providing recurring tweets without having to alter their existing TAC’s
SPAM Rule #8
“If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account”
I agree with this being a strange move. Twitter wants to become a business tool themselves, yet they want to take away the MOST important feature for marketing/advertising? Unless they are trying to eliminate their competition, it makes no sense; and that’s not a good move either. You don’t want to slap your biggest supporters in the face.
Twaitter is still a great tool and I will not be switching. I plan to use the copy feature to make up for Twitter’s ignorant decision. Keep rockin Twaitter!
This takes the efficiency and production out of this system [Twitter]….it’s too bad Twitter has changed this policy. I think they are going to see a large loss of users and activity. I can’t spend my entire day on Twitter tweeting regularly about my business.
This will make it nearly impossible for me to enjoy using Twitter. I work full time in a job without constant access to a computer.
To say I am disappointed is an understatement. I love [Twitter], or now should say I “loved” [Twitter], past tense.
Wonder what the real reason is?
I was dismayed when reading that the recurring tweets were going to be disabled. Twitter has got it SO VERY WRONG. If they want to grow the twitter community and for it to be a useful as opposed to useless business tool, then surely they must recognised that it is often not until the 3rd, 4th or 5th time that we hear a message do we actually take action.
I agree that SPAMMING is adhorrent, however, followers have chosen to follow our tweets. If they don’t like what we do, they’ll leave.
It is insane to think that one tweet that may have be a “Life saving message” will reach all followers when it id sent.
Although only new to Twitter, I think my love affair with it has just died.
Carlos,
The decision by Twitter is one that we regret as well. With regard to your comments, I believe we can help you. We have a copy feature that allows you to rapidly repost your messages once you’ve sent them.
ex) “Monday is the weekly meeting at the convention center”.
Post this and it is available in your ‘scheduled messages’. Merely click on the copy button next to the message and the text is placed in the message form and the time is set to the same as the previous message. Click the date field and move the date up to the next monday and click ‘schedule’. Repeat. You’ll find that this only takes a few moments and your messages will be setup just as they were before.
NOTE: To adhere to Twitter’s terms, we would advise that you modify the text slightly for each repost.
Thanks,
Ryan
TwAitter
Ryan, I appreciate your trying to offer a work around. Unfortunately, for a company like ours that invested time in your service to input hundreds of tweets that play over three or four weeks without repeat to “merely click on the copy” manifests your mis-understanding of entrepreneurs who use twitter and twaitter. For example, Travel Tuesday is 52 times per year. Do you really believe it is reasonable to copy say 50 tweets on that one day 52 times throughout the year? By my math using Twaitter’s copy feature that is 2600 copied tweets versus 50 tweets set to recur – not a realistic solution for today’s entrepreneur trying to do more with less. Contrary to your rosy outlook – this takes far more than only a few moments – valuable moments to do something else. And clearly Twitter is mis-understanding its own value to real businesses and its own follow / unfollow feature that allows users to feret Spam. I can only think it must be nice to live in a world of endless venture dollars with no regard to earning real money.
This stupid decision by Twitter makes their once very cool application almost useless to me. I was using the recurring feature to remind my followers (mostly poker players) of weekly poker games held in the same venues every week. I cannot imagine that I’ll have the time to post these reminder notices week after week after week. Just crazy.
Give the copy feature a try. We are also considering a ‘bulk’ upload feature that allows you to upload a spreadsheet of scheduled messages.
I’m very interested the the “bulk” upload feature you mentioned. Good idea. It allows updating recurring twits without having to be connected to the internet. Thanks.
Bulk upload from a spreadsheet is a great idea- I could then get it ready month at a time, doing the variations needed to stop exact copies. There’s also the fact that Twaitter is very slow here in Australia, and it will save Twaitter bandwidth. It will certainly bring me back to using Twaitter again
I agree bulk upload spreadsheet or CSv file would be an excellent solution. Cheers!
The bulk upload from a spreadsheet is a good idea. I now have tweets loaded in a spreadsheet so can pick and choose based on topic what I want to send.
However, I have to say that after trying socialoomph, their copy function is at least 3 times faster than twaitter and with the other functions I may have to stay with that programme, unless twaitter has something up it’s sleeve to entice me back.
Ryan,
I’m sure you and your team are working feverishly to get your Ping.fm solution up to speed so it performs as well as your marquis TwAitter tool. Since losing the ability to create and schedule my Recurring Tweets, I’ve not been nearly as active here as before. I hope you guys do a nice job w/ Ping.fm
In the meanwhile, I’ve had to search for a suite of Twitter tools to get me back to sea level. Luckily, using a suite to tools has enabled me to do what TwAitter did in one tool. Its not as clean nor as productive, but its a decent work around w/out violating the Twitter TAC.
I’ll circle back again in a few days to get the latest on your progress and hopefully it will be as good as before.
Neil
Hello dear Ryan,
we were deeply sadened after announcing the recurring tweet phasing out,cause for us as a radiostation we have recurring radio shows. And it makes no sense to have somebody sit there 24/7 to write a tweet only to announce a show. We guess the idea of sceduling tweets is gone after twitters new terms and scaring app builders of exclude them out of Twitter.
But instead of writing you a non creative reply I thought of something.
Is Twitter checking your timeline for duplicate tweets?
right?
why not include an option to Twaitter to erase a tweet automatically after a day so no duplicate tweets will show up on the timeline.
I dont think Twitter checks and compares every single tweet out there. it only compares the tweets in the personal timeline for a duplicate tweet.
so sceduling is making sense again.
Just an idea…
Im sure you have gone though lots of possible setups and hours of headache how to intergrate a feature to save tWaitter.
You know our app was very important for us.
Now we enter our tweets by hand and of course there are not many anymore.
Have a great day
Harris (heartfm.net)
Has Twitter ever listened to actual birds? Just as well they aren’t running the planet.
Ryan,
You guys need to stand up to Twitter and draw a line in
your own sand. Just play the other’s against them.
I get better results on FB and smaller social sites.
They are NOT the end all. Who can keep up with all their
rules. Who would you say is their largest competitor?
While don’t you poll everyone and present it to twitter.
Infact,why don’t they reply to these posts.
We are the customer right? They act like OPEC or the MOB.
How do the rest of you feel?
Also, one thing I do not like is the automatic DM’s- I end up deleting them fast. Guess twitter has no problem with them. They need some users in mgt. Next time tell them
I said to get their heads out of the sand.(pardon the pun)
Kirk Nickey
This was very convenient for me. I hate to hear that that think we are just sending spams, so not true — atleast for me. Hope they will lower their standards, keep me informed.
Does anyone know of another free service where you can
set up automatic posts to other social media such as
Facebook,Linkedin,Giblink, etc. I am so tired of setting up
individual tweets even-though you can copy them it still
wastes time. Also, what do you think or tweeting from
1am to 5am? I just do it on the weekends.
Kirk Nickey(skype)
772-545-4999
Kirk,
Twaitter will be re launching Recurring messages with our integration of Ping.fm. Ping.fm offers posting to over a hundred social networks.
With our new feature you can setup automated recurring tweets to go through any social network supported by Ping.fm (except Twitter per their request). It sounds like this is what you’re looking for with the exception of the Twitter restriction. (http://ping.fm)
Thanks
Ryan
Hey Kirk,
Our new version will integrate Ping.fm which lets you post to all the networks that you mentioned.
Ryan
Congrats on the progress. Look forward to when recurring is turned back on. I offer a service that helps Twitter Chatters find each other by me Tweeting the existence of a Twitter Chat Schedule to each individual chat. Since I am not making any money on it, the last thing I am going to do is set up 80 msgs each week. It’s hard enough to set them all up one time.
I appreciate that twaitter tried to make copy as easy as possible, but it is still work that prevents me from providing a service which I have been told by many is valuable.
Ryan,
You took your lumps from many of us who got nervous and a little upset by not being able to schedule Tweets at pre determined times [but] TwAitter prevailed ~ Kudos to you!
There’s a good reason you and your team were able to cross the chasm and I for one will be curious to see and read how you guys were able to make this happen.
Neil
Hello Ryan,
Congrats on these great news…
Really cant wait 2 see this feature again!
Thumbs up for you and your team.
Harris Tsiantos
http://www.harris-tsiantos.com
http://www.heartfm.net
According to the update to this post the re-occuring feature will be turned back on, any idea when?
We are shooting for Sunday, December 13th (Tomorrow). You will also be able to set up recurring messages through Ping.fm and all the social networks that they support.
Ryan
Hey Ryan – Great news. We’ll be looking for the re-feature today. You’re alright in my book. Thanks for the holiday gift. Happy happy holidays to you & all the twaitters!
-Motorino
Thanks! Happy Holidays. Releasing recurring today.
We had to delay the release until this evening due to an issue that we found at the last minute. The team is working on the issue to day and targeting late evening for release.
We had to delay the release until this evening due to an issue that we found at the last minute. The team is working on the issue to day and targeting late evening for release.
Fabulous to see recurring tweets back – great work Twaitter team. Are all my previously setup recurring tweets functional again? They apear to be all paused. But they also appear to be there and scheduled when I go to calendar view. Do I have to click the “play” button on each one to get them going again?
Ryan, Happy New Year!
Is recurring tweets coming back?
-Motorino
Hey Motorino,
We had the perfect storm happen on the application. We are doing changes to several parts of the site to resolve the situation.
Testing is going very well so far. Please check back in the coming week.
Thanks,
Ryan
Hi Ryan – Nice work getting recurring back. When will new schedule view be back. It is a key component of recurring tweets. Without it, it is impossible to figure out what is going on with all the tweets, edit, update etc.
Thanks again,
Motorino
Hey Ryan,
Just checking in again to see if I should schedule some Twaitter time this weekend. Can;t do it without a calendar so that I may see what’s already in the feed. Any ETA on calendar implementation?
Have a great weekend Ryan!
Motorino
Looks like I may have not responded to this comment. Yes the recurring feature is back and live in production
If they want to grow the twitter community and for it to be a useful as opposed to useless business tool, then surely they must recognised that it is often not until the 3rd, 4th or 5th time that we hear a message do we actually take action.
not seeing it yet — any updates?
Looks like I may have not responded to this comment. Yes the recurring feature is back and live in production
Twaitter announced recurring tweets were coming back “in the coming days” on Dec. 4. That’s over a month ago. What’s going on?
Hey Martin,
We had the perfect storm happen on the application. We are doing changes to several parts of the site to resolve the situation.
Testing is going very well so far. Please check back in the coming week.
Thanks,
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
Happy New Year!
As above, is ‘recurring’ tweets coming back? What’s the latest news?
Cheers
Colin
Hey Colin,
A lot going on at Twaitter. We’re working hard on putting an entirely new version out. Thanks for your patience.
Ryan
When can we expect to see the recurring tweet function again?
We’re shooting for this week. Stay tuned
I LOVE TWAITTER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ANYTHING I CAN DO FOR YOU GUYS!!!!!!!!!!!
Hey,
Recurring Tweets was only shut off for about 1 month. We’ve had them back up since November 09. Thanks for the info.
Ryan
I loved what you wrote. Your writing style is really good, it makes an enjoyable read.
I discovered last night that Twitter is not simply blocking recurring tweets as theyve actually implemented filters that physically block recurring tweets..I was using an iPhone Twitter client.
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