#41

I’ve been on Twitter for 5 years (ironically, I just looked it up, and in 3 days it will be exactly 5 years.) I use Twitter for both personal and business reasons, and have two active accounts. On my personal account I have close to 17,000 followers, on my business account I have over 46,000. Needless to say, I get hundreds of new followers each week. I have not the time to do what used to be considered good Twitter etiquette: look at each new follower, learn something about them, decide if I want to follow back, DM them a personal hello and welcome them to my Twitter stream. I miss those days but I work 7 days a week, 12-18 hours a day, and unless Twitter wants to hire me an assistant it’s not going to happen – as nice as it would be.

Twitter is stuck in the past, which is disappointing and frustrating.

This is a BAD idea – no doubt born of humble and lovely ideas – but it’s bad policy.

Followers want and expect a follow back. Understandably. Automating the process is a good idea.

I’m disappointed.

#42

So does that mean we can provide auto follow back to our users with a limit to the number of auto follow backs allowed per day?

Auto follow back is being used by businesses to follow back their users so that they can communicate effectively through DM.

Telecom companies use auto follow back so that their users can DM them their cell numbers when they are facing an issue(this is how twitter is being used as a customer support tool)

Removing auto follow back because it is being misused is not the right approach as there are quite a few legitimate and important use cases.

Twitter as a customer support platform takes a beating if you prevent auto follow back as this is the only way of communicating privately with customers.

#43

You may provide follow-back features so long as they are completely manual; there is no permitted threshold for follower automation/bulk activity as these behaviors are completely prohibited. In practice, this means you can still provide an interface which displays any users who have followed you and users may choose to then follow these back individually. This allows for greater granularity and control for brands and users, and greater opportunity for developers to build social analytics around potential followings: by highlighting the best, most relevant users to follow-back manually this provides a greater potential user benefit than indiscriminate auto-follow-back

Regards,
@truebe
Twitter Platform Operations

#44

In regulated environments such as financial services, we are limited as to how the user can interact with social data. As such we’d like to propose a some minor changes in how Tweets can be displayed http://blog.ftsee.com/2013/07/23/proposal-for-displaying-tweets-in-a-regulated-environment/

#45

Hello,

Thanks for the feedback, we’ll take these suggestions into consideration for any future changes we may make to our Display Requirements.

Regards,
@truebe
Twitter Platform Operations

#46

Why do you try to micro manage how your users follow and unfollow and use Twitter? If someone wants to follow back all of their followers, before they could do it automatically, now they are STILL going to do it but because of this decision, it’s going to take them much more time. Tedious, boring, and wasteful time that is going to leave your users frustrated and annoyed.

Do you see Facebook suspending accounts for sending too many friend requests? Do you see Google+ limiting the number of pages you can give a +1 to? Let people use Twitter how they want to use it and they will be much happier.

If I was in charge over there, I’d be much more focused on the bigger picture - how to improve overall use, how to generate revenue, optimizing for ads, and probably most important, making things easier for third party developers, not harder.

It’s 3rd party developers that are making Twitter great. You’re going to end up finding a competitor come out that is going to do things right and not force little micro managing rules on every day users for no apparent reason. Twitter is not what it was when you guys started, people don’t only follow their real-life friends so stop trying to make it into something that people don’t want it to be and just let it evolve and you’ll be much more successful…

#47

I had to change my app website to migrate from auto-followback to manual follow-back, I have designed ajax calls with Javascript triggered by a follow button, so my questions are:

1.- Is there any time frame beetween the follow api calls to take in consideration ir order to not been taken by twitter as a agressive follow?

2.- Does this new rule apply to unfollows to? my site had the option to remove the unwanted followers in bulk, with a daily limit of course

I was blocked twice by twitter so I wanna do the things right

Thanks in advanced!

#48

Hello,

  1. You should perform these actions when the user manually requests the action be taken, similar to how a user may follow/unfollow users on twitter.com. If users who engage with these features are being suspended for aggressive use we may ask you to make changes; we hold developers accountable for their userbase. Unfortunately I cant give specific thresholds here, but I would recommend implementing these features with reasonable throttles.

2.This rule applies to both following and unfollowing. Any feature which allows for users to select multiple users—to take either a follow or an unfollow action—will need to be removed, or reconfigured. Users can only select and follow or unfollow one account at a time. You may also not utilize the block feature in a bulk manner to remove followers.

Regards,
@truebe
Twitter Platform Operations

#49

I think we have to take the benefit of twitter by following its rules .

#50

En verdad no entiendo,porque se me a suspendido,siempre e tenido muy presente todas las normas y reglas y de repente me suspenden,agradezco me reintegren de nuevo mi cuenta,es un medio de expresarme y mantenerme informado y compartir con mis seguidores,muchas gracias anticipadas al equipo de twitter

#51

I am using Twitter for a school project. I have downloaded the Twitter app on the iPad (4th generation) and the iPod touch (3rd generation). When I compare the trending hashtags (as well as the Tweets that correspond with these hashtags) on my mobile devices, they do not all match up with the trending hashtags and Tweets on Twitter’s website on my computer, even though I am using the same account and have selected “tailored trends” on all of the devices. Does anyone know why this is? I was told it might have something to do with the API. Also, are the Tweets for the trending hashtags on the apps only the Top Tweets or do they include all Tweets? I was directed to the developers message board for answers to these questions and would really appreciate any help. Thank you.

#52

sorry i dont know about Auto following can you help in that pls

#53

I, personally, want real/loyal followers. People truly interested in my content. I only follow accounts that offer content I find interesting. Another point of interest to me is why people would hand over their Twitter username and passwords to a third party application unless they are proven to be trustworthy? Seems to me you are only asking for trouble.

#54

I took notice that it seems your intention to stop the automatic follow back.
This is really a disaster! I cannot stay all the day long, sit checking the email to see who followed me so that I can follow her back.
I use also spam filters in order to be sure that who want’s to follow me, is real and has real intention to do it.
Thus, why to block something it’s so useful??
I think that in 2013 we should take advantage of automation rather than to penalize any initiative!!
If you continue on this step, we will be back in 1513 rather than 2013.

#55

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#56

No estoy de acuerdo con twitter de cancelar el servicio “Seguimiento de vuelta a los que me siguen o sigo” que mejor podría ser que si yo sigo a una persona por x o y razón, esa persona me siga de vuelta para tener una mejor relación de amistad y cooperación. Saludos… Farley Marin

#57

@julia_cortez1 made some really smart suggestions. I had not thought of this but then I thought, Twitter has some really smart people too and all they do is work on issues like this. Why have they not thought of it? I think it is safe to say they have.

I think we are seeing the need to monetize Twitter becoming a priority and the fact is big business buys ads. Small Businesses in general have to date shown much less aptitude to buy such ads. Big business has no problem to increase their payroll by 0.02% and hire a person to perform this function. SMB’s however have a hard time increasing their payroll by 14% for the same results. Spam driven automation sucks. We all agree on that. I would like to know the exact count of people who followed someone and that resulted in them being followed back and that made them feel like they were spammed.

My guess is that, not a single person has ever followed someone and had then had them follow them back in itself creating a bad UX on the Twitter platform. In fact, if asked “do you like it when the brands you follow, follow you back?” almost everyone would say yes.

My honest guess is as this policy only stands to lower the overall UX, it is a result of negotiations for a large ad buy or part of plan to sell large corporations on the new value proposition created by leveraging the platform to their benefit. That or Twitter will start selling this service after the dust clears. We have used auto follow back for about half of our 9,000 that we currently follow. They say it is to protect the content of our home page but the fact is, and I see it right now, the people who follow me have the content I like to find and now instead of enjoying this content, I will spend what little time I already available for it hitting a button over and over again in a mindless fashion that any monkey (or api calling script) could easily do.

With social media ROI already a tough sell that is hard to justify with the SMB I think Twitter just made it one part more expensive and one step further from justifiable ROI. Therefore, making their own ads that much less attractive. We have planned and financed our first Twitter paid campaign to start September 3rd. We have informed the client that changes to the Twitter api have now taken Twitter back down to the questionable ROI category. We proactively moved this spend elsewhere as who wants to buy a bunch of followers from Twitter if it means you are going to have to sit at a computer for hours and follow them back one by one.

We rep brands and we are a brand. As a brand you do not pick and choose who you like. A brand who makes public votes as to who they like and do not like is costing itself money on a regular basis. It is not usually smart to even cast political votes but when you start segmenting your customer base into a liked and disliked column you are going to have issues. I think our best bet is to un-follow everyone and simply not follow people on Twitter anymore. I think a lot of small brands will have to now adopt this strategy. I will have to read the doc on this again to understand how not following anyone is going to make my Twitter UX better.

#58

I am sorry, but we are a very small non-profit who needs all of the assistance we can get reaching the public. Twitter’s decision to discontinue auto followback is causing us a severe drain on our time, having to spend additional time researching and following–individually–each new follower. I for one would greatly appreciate it if you would reconsider this decision, especially since we are paying for auto-followback on a monthly basis to increase our reach to potential contributors. Thank you.

#59

I need more help on , 'How to unfollow with my mobile phone. My sms is filled up and can’t control the situation.
Thanks

#60

Pls I want to unsubscribe to 40404.
Thank you.