Developer guidelines updates

AnnieM2009 · 2013-07-05T15:30:21.000Z

Why would you want to auto follow? I get lots of followers that are just ad sites that I have no interest in. I get emails when someone follows me and I can choose whether to follow them back. We should be able to block them before they can follow without blocking everyone. But the choice should be ours anyway.
I can never understand why people want celebrities or famous people they don’t know to follow them. They want them to read every random tweet the make? I want Brad Pitt to read that I went to my cousins on the 4th? Unless you are advertising something why would you want anyone to follow unless you know them? I don’t even like that everyone can read my tweets that I address specifically to a particular person via @and their name. Sure, it’s interesting for me to see what celebrities are posting, but I don’t want them reading mine unless I address it to them (which I’m sure they don’t see anyway because of the quantity of people tweeting them.)

amancool5 · 2013-07-05T15:34:35.000Z

Auto-followback isn’t a good idea. For me, following someone is discretionary, and depends on the following factors :

The tweep should add value to my timeline. No spam or abuse.
Should have tweeted in the last 60 days.
Ideally, followers should be more than the follows
Ideally, have a proper DP and bio, unless he/she is a celeb.
Should be tweeting links rather than merely quotes or statements.
Should not be in love with oneself.

Since all the above need a closer look at the timeline of the tweep, auto-followback won’t work.

pagan386 · 2013-07-05T16:06:15.000Z

No, Twitter is about following & connection to who you want to. As proven twitter users are quite capable of deciding who they want connections with. It is not for companies to decide. Awful idea.

schachin · 2013-07-05T16:36:22.000Z

I have always hand followed my accounts, but I don’t pick based on similar interests or similar whatevers you have decided I should, I pick because someone is a legitimate account and may add something to my feed that I enjoy. I have over 25 columns I follow to pick out of the noise what I want and then when I am bored or have some time in the day, I sit and go through my stream and repost content from those people who have posted interesting things that day.

This is a very poorly thought out policy for all the reasons people have said and more. As someone with over 65k contributed tweets to your system (no spam), if I have to start worrying about suspensions because my follows don’t fit what YOU think I should be following, I will be done with Twitter and so will the other power users I know and since my industry is Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing which probably accounts for a good amount of your traffic on a given day and are the people who advise clients which social media to pay attention to and which not, I can tell you that will be the beginning of the end.

Why would we tell any client to use you if they cannot follow back all their followers? Why would we tell anyone to bother with Twitter if it becomes a hassle to use it and they have to worry about being suspended because Twitter didn’t like who they followed? If you take away the business purpose you will take away the point of entry for many and deciding who and how many people we should follow back will do just that.

But it is just like I predicted in an article I wrote about you about a year or so ago… you were on the road to mediocrity… if you push through this policy welcome to mediocre and the slow death til someone else comes along.

It’s like Facebook… there was a time in history where in Russia you could only buy one car, so no matter the feeling about the car it is what you used. That is Facebook… and it seems you are set on becoming the same.

chandu2708 · 2013-07-05T16:45:16.000Z

Thank you so much. will do.

-bala.

PegBrantley · 2013-07-05T17:37:59.000Z

Excellent points. I too use SocialOomph and know that occasionally it’s in my best interest to review the new twitter accounts I’m following. The auto-follow and DM through SocialOomph makes my life easier and expands my presence in an easy, unintrusive way.

WebbyStation · 2013-07-05T19:45:45.000Z

I agree that DM’s have lost their effect with automation. I almost never look at my DM’s and as a result I miss some that I wish I had seen.

WebbyStation · 2013-07-05T19:51:07.000Z

With respect @lespuces, I too do not like auto DM’s. You suggest that we should not follow spammers, but how can we know if they are spammers or not until we follow them. There are many very interesting handles out there that send auto DM’s. You cannot know if they are spammers until after the fact. So now you are burdened with the task or unfollowing people that appeared interesting, tried them out, and now they send auto DM’s which crowd out the DM’s that are personal and useful.

I vote kill auto DM

lo33aine · 2013-07-06T04:04:44.000Z

No.I don’t agree because it defeats the purpose of having a choice, that you only follow users that interests you. If this happens our twitter page will be spammed with posts you don’t want to read. It’s also a waste of time because it messes up with posts you want to read. Nonsense.

mcoster · 2013-07-06T10:02:58.000Z

I understand the considerations. On the other hand, let me give you the example of a project I set up: with a local healthcare institution, we set up a twitter channel with workflow using Hootsuite that enables parents of children with all kinds of problems to ask for advice from a doctor. The people operating the account are all registered MD’s. As I psychologist, I helped determine the strategy and proposition. One of the key succes factors was based upon the auto follow back. Let me explain:

If a parent is searching for a way to ask a relatively personal (medical) question about their child, you want them to be able to ask that question the moment they find you. Otherwise, the motivation passes and they will search for another option, most of the times not backed up by MD’s. Engage in action when motivation is high. So that’s whey we setup the auto follow back and auto DM. Once they follow the account, we follow them back so that they are technically able to send us a DM, which is not possible otherwise. The auto DM contains a short instruction “Thank you for following. You will be followed back so that you can aks your (personal) question in a DM”.

As you can read, this is a very practical use of auto follow back. Has nothing to do with marketing or relevance of content. Just to enable followers to send us a DM. I hope you can take this case and discuss in internally. Here in the Netherlands is was seen by the Social Media Club as the frist usage of auto DM and auto follow back that was actually valuable and not annoying.

So, for the sake of this account and the parents with questions about their children, I hope you re-enable the auto follow back, maybe with a special request form for cases like ours?

lespuces · 2013-07-06T14:59:08.000Z

First look on their tweets. If all their tweets just promotion some products, you can expect also DMs for other same.
If you do get DMs that you find spam - unfollow.
I own many accounts and not getting any spam. Why? Because I follow real people, not dummy users. That is all.
So, what you do is what you get. Auto DMs are good, nothing wrong to welcome a new follower. I’m using it and my DMs sent only onece to a new follower. I’m not running any campaigns.
And if you follow only 10’s or 100’s users you will not get spam, as you select whom to follow. If you follow 1000’s that is problem, problem with you, and you become part of spam!!! It is not realistic to really follow 1000’s, and if you do, expect spam from your behavior.

lespuces · 2013-07-06T23:39:45.000Z

You should remember all following is only your choice. Why to put limitations to all. Some follow others to read their tweets, and some follow to promote their tweets. You care about quality, follow only your interests. If you care about quantity, use automation.

davidsanger · 2013-07-07T02:26:11.000Z

Ideally I’d like something in-between. I can review a page of 100 new followers with bio and counts, quickly deselect the spam and ones I don’t want, and then bulk follow the rest.

AJDevereux · 2013-07-07T05:33:22.000Z

Hi, boooo, not a good change at all. I manage multiple accounts on behalf of clients and the autofollow system allows me to make sure fans/customers get followed back. It is then up to me to delete those accounts who I see as gaming the system. As we know, social media is about being social. If a company does not follow back what is it saying? You can listen to us but we cant be bothered to listen to you’ ? Manually following everyone is going to take a lot of time, unnecessary time when we consider i can add important accounts to Twitter lists.

Please reverse this decision.

Thanks

SiliconMond · 2013-07-08T10:51:08.000Z

…

RightSaidJames · 2013-07-09T15:03:16.000Z

If you did a survey of Twitter users (by which I mean people who use Twitter to read what others are saying and have conversations), I think you’d find that the vast, vast majority of them consider auto-DMs to be spam. You can’t opt out of them (there’s simply no clear cut way to tell if a brand is going to auto-DM you), they’re automated and indiscriminate, and they provide little value to the recipient. Many people (myself included) find them intrusive, the online equivalent of cold calling or doorstep selling. Furthermore, as many brands send auto-DMs without following back they are often a one-way form of communication, which completely undermines the point of a DM and the principles of social media itself. Put simply, auto-DMs are stupid pointless and annoying. They also fit very neatly with Wikipedia’s definition of spam:

“Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately”

As I said above, auto-DMs are unsolicited because following someone isn’t an opt-in to being DMed by an automatic script. They are indiscriminate because auto-DMs are sent to new followers without being vetted, and they are bulk because, well, they’re sent to everyone.

The only people who are in favour of auto-DMs are the people who send them. No one has ever felt ‘welcomed’ by an automatic message.

RightSaidJames · 2013-07-09T15:00:00.000Z

Twitter is, by design, not reciprocal by default. If I follow a brand or a celebrity I don’t expect them to follow me back. For normal people I would only expect them to follow me back if they knew me already or thought that my tweets were relevant to them. Furthermore, just because your tweets are relevant to me doesn’t mean that my tweets are relevant to you; to put it another way, why should my tweets be cluttering your feed if you don’t find any value in reading them?

Furthermore, you don’t need to follow someone to respond to their @mentions or interact with them on hashtags. Your followers can still start a conversation with you or reply to you, and you following them doesn’t make this easier or more convenient.

You may not like this policy change but it is very successful because it forces people to be selective about who they choose to follow, which is good for overall user experience.

froginthevalley · 2013-07-09T17:18:58.000Z

Thanks for taking the time to write this, more perspective is always welcomed. I would not consider this type of follow back “aggressive” in any way, at the scale you describe.

kofic · 2013-07-09T18:45:11.000Z

I’d agree with you IF followship was not required to send a private message. I would rather my customers send me a complaint in a private message - rather than blasting it in a tweet.

Twitter seems to think only individual users with 100s of followers use the service. No - celebrities, city governments etc. use the service - you really want a city to follow back 1000s of their citizens individually??

kofic · 2013-07-09T18:59:00.000Z

How does this affect the friends/create API call?

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/post/friendships/create