Earlier this year, in its ongoing effort to fight bots, spam and fake news, Twitter announced a change in its policy related to automation of tweets that will affect the entire social media management ecosystem.

Effective March 23, this year, Twitter will no longer allow users or third-party platforms to publish similar content to multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. If you don’t comply with the change, there are consequences — such as possible blacklisting of your accounts.

While multi-location enterprises have a legitimate motive to disseminate branding down to location-level Twitter accounts, Twitter’s new policy will curb the kind of bulk tweeting, bots and duplicate accounts that complicated the 2016 election.

That’s a good thing for America, but it may have some repercussions on enterprises when managing their online reputation.

Because of the change, ORM platforms such as Reputation.com can no longer enable sharing the same post to multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. You’ll still be able to schedule and publish on Twitter — but you’ll have to do it one account at a time.

The good news is that it only affects posting. Nothing will change in the way Reputation.com monitors, replies to and acts upon customer engagement on social media across all accounts an organization maintains.

So, What Now?

Rather than publishing identical brand-level content to all your locations’ Twitter pages, the best practice moving forward will be to publish brand-level content to a single headquarters page, and publish custom content crafted specifically for each location in your organization. Sounds like a lot of work — but it’s nothing a serious ORM platform can’t accomplish.

Twitter’s new policy represents a great opportunity to create location-specific content that engages individual communities surrounding your locations. We think it will help increase overall engagement and build strong local communities.

As always, Reputation.com will continue to deliver the best technology and services to help  you tune into the voice of the customer and engage with customers on social media channels — and we’re working on new solutions for posting on Twitter that are as streamlined and as simple as possible.

Read this blog post more about how you can engage audiences on social media.