Thanks for taking the time to reply, Andy.
Okay, so now I see why they considered it a bot. So what would you suggest given my situations here?
I don’t know if you’re familiar with beBee. It’s a social platform that started in Spain and went world-wide. In less than 2 years they are up to 12 million users. One of the big things they do is help promote the articles that people post on their Publisher platform. That’s for another account, @beBee, to collect. The two founders are huge Twitter fans. That makes Twitter their partner of choice when it comes to promotion. The CEO went so far as to write a post asking every member to add their Twitter handle to their profiles, and if they didn’t have one to get one.
BeBee also has 140 or so brand ambassadors, of which I’m one. There are about 60 English speaking ambassadors, 44 of which signed up asking to have their posts tweeted by @beBeeEmbassy. They filled out a Google Sheet that I used to build RSS feeds to their beBee blogs. The Google Sheet is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TCQkmuEwzDx2ziXcx-g-PfB9xwAVA9lEBAslJWJUs84/edit?usp=sharing They didn’t just give consent, they specifically asked to be included.
Ideally, we’d love to extend this to the Spanish, Portuguese, and German ambassadors as well, but with other accounts. Those would likely be @beBee+whatever “embassy” is in those languages. Of course, I first need to figure out how to stay operational.
Ideally, it would be best to @mention the author in the tweet. That would generate organic follower growth and aid future promotion. That’s why I based tweets on the format of a share. If that is verboten, I can go other routes.
I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts on them.
1 – I can continue as-is but drop the @ from the tweets and replace @beBee with #beBee. I think that would look silly, but at least there would be no mention, so the anti-spam wouldn’t trigger.
2 – I can cut all scheduling. 44 ambassadors pump out enough stuff. I stored about 150 distinct posts in a week… If they ever fall low, I can grab tweets from their stored inventory of past tweets to make up the difference. I’m not sure if that will satisfy the anti-spam bot, though. Frankly, I doubt it.
3 - I can mention Ambassadors by their full name as in ‘ By Andy Piper “How to Stop Paul from Going Insane LOL” on beBee’. That would require some fiddling to get everything into 140. Screen names are limited to 15 characters max, but not so full names. I’ll also run into encoding issues for names like D’Arcy, but that’s no biggie. This would be less effective, but write-restricted apps are not effective at all.
I think maybe #3 would be the best compromise, maybe even with using a hash tag instead of an @ on beBee. Or, do you have other ideas?
While I understand the need for anti-spam secrecy, working in the dark is difficult at best. I think it’s the newness of @beBeeEmbassy that is causing the problem. My 20K or so followers never trigger the filter probably because there’s lots of interaction.
On a side note, we are swiping the “tip @LinkedInEditors” idea that LinkedIn uses. Ours will be “buzz @beBee.” I don’t think that should cause an issue. But, with about 4 million English-speaking users, maybe it will. Thoughts?
Paul
