Bottom line: No spam through our application

The short version...

• Use Tweet Spinner tweets as a means to supplement your existing tweets that you do by yourself. The majority of your tweets should be typed by you in real-time, and should be topical and non-spammy.
• Twitter accounts that are "fully automated", with only limited human interaction, will almost certainly get suspended. Our app is meant to complement your hands-on Twitter activity, not as a "set it and forget it" app.
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• Do not send duplicate tweets over and over again, either to the same account or accounts.
• Tweets sent through Tweet Spinner must be substantively different from each other. If you repeat the same tweet over and over again, even if the text is slightly different or even if spaced out over several hours (or even days), you risk suspension.
• Do not send @replies to people who haven't @replied you first. At the same time, accounts that have NO @replies demonstrate a lack of engagement with the Twitter community.
• Do not send promotional URLs over and over again. If every one of your tweets contains a URL, it is pretty clear evidence that you are a spammer.
• Be careful with automated DMs. Remember that if many users report you as a spammer, your account risks suspension. Many users regularly report auto-DMers as spammers, so you should use our rules-based system to deliver timely, personalized, topical DMs, rather than blast out promotional URLs.
• Do not use Twitter as a broadcast medium; Twitter is about engaging in conversation with other users, NOT about blasting promotions to them.
• Do not create multiple Twitter accounts for the sole purpose of blasting out promotions. It is far better to focus on one legitimate account, rather than creating many accounts. Twitter recognizes such serial account creation, and will likely flag your accounts.
• Pay attention to your content! If you are tweeting about topics that are frequently associated with spam (e.g., MLM, network marketing, teeth whitening, making money fast, etc), you should be particularly careful to abide by all rules, and ensure that your tweets are spam-free. Your account will likely be under additional scrutiny.
• Do not blast out meaningless quotations or other "junk" content for the simple purpose of obscuring occasional promotional URLs. Such quote-blasting is widely seen as a spam tactic, and will result in account suspension.
• Do not believe, rely on, or follow any strategy or guide on things like getting rich on Twitter or getting lots of followers fast. To succeed on Twitter, you need to personally and constructively build your account with legitimate content, legitimate followers, and ethical behavior. Any "shortcut strategy" will almost certainly lead to failure.
• Read our Rules of the Road for filtered following. Accounts that combine spammy tweets with aggressive follower churn are at particular risk from Twitter suspensions.

The longer version...

Tweetspinner.com offers two powerful features that offer businesses robust means to responsibly communicate with customers. These are our "smart tweets" and "rules-based DM" systems. Like any sophisticated, programmatic application, it is our flexibility that allows our customers to innovate new ways to engage with customers. That said, we require that customers use our product responsibly -- this is both for your own good, and for ours. In this document, we outline these features, and offer guidelines for appropriate use of these advanced tools.

While we recognize that the emerging medium of Twitter has yet to fully evolve its definitions of spam, we believe that in many cases spam is pretty self-evident. Our goal with Tweetspinner is to enhance the Twitter experience for all users. As such, we simply will not tolerate spam through our product.

What are they?

"Smart tweets" is a feature that gives Tweetspinner users the ability to schedule tweets; these tweets can be constructed using a simple programmatic interface (which we call "tweetscript") which affords customers the ability to more accurately communicate personalized messages to their audience.

Our rules-based DM system extends the use of tweetscript to allow customers to construct complex IF/THEN/ELSE and EITHER/OR triggers to deliver direct messages that self-personalize. We believe that this offers users a more personalized, direct, and appropriate use of the direct message system than the "blind broadcast" auto-DM systems currently offered by competitors.

Who are they for?

We designed both of these features with businesses in mind. Indeed, we're very familiar with support systems and email response systems which deliver targeted information to requesting users by analyzing content/recipient data. We wished to bring this level of important dynamic information to Twitter.

As an example, in regards to our Smart Tweets feature, imagine that you are one of the many "24 hour only" retailers (take a look at steepandcheap.com -- they do not use our service) which features a single product for sale each day. You wish to use Twitter as a means to alert your customer base of the exact time of those sales, including the item for sale, the quantity, the price, and the sale duration.

You could have an employee wait up till midnight each night to send out a tweet. That's obviously pretty costly from a human resources perspective. Indeed, it is unlikely that that hypothetical employee is sitting there hand-writing each sales letter that goes out via email to alert an email list to the sale. No, he is more than likely using one of the many professional-grade email list management services, that allow him to schedule delivery of templated emails filled in with the particulars of that night's sale.

It is from this perspective with which we designed Tweetspinner's smart tweets feature. We extend the ability to send scheduled tweets, offered in other applications, with a specialized mini-language. This language allows that hypothetical retailer to queue up tweets to announce forthcoming sales. And much like the email list management services, he can do so by using templates, and by specifying, for example, the product/cost/duration/etc from database fields.

In regards to our rules-based direct messaging, since we are actually replying or messaging an individual, we can go several steps further to ensure that our message is maximally appropriate. Through our system, for example, nationwide businesses can recognize individual recipient's locations, and deliver directions to franchises nearest to them. Indeed, we've built a robust trigger system which allows for delivery of extremely targeted messages: "if the user is from Los Angeles, and they tweeted me asking for prices, and they are a new Twitter user, then deliver message X."

That said, we recognize that offering rich programmatic tools to facilitate communication does not always result in usage that we had anticipated, or that we deem acceptable.

As stated earlier, our goal is to enhance the Twitter experience for everyone. As a company, we're responsible for several groundbreaking applications, including Versionista.com, which figured prominently in the last Presidential election. We have dedicated significant resources to Tweetspinner, and we simply won't have a few bad apples jeopardize our relationship with Twitter, or the Twitter community at large.

As such, we wish to categorically state that we are firmly against Twitter spam. Any users of these feature must absolutely read Twitter's definitions of spam. While we recognize that Twitter is an evolving medium, any accounts on Tweetspinner which engage in behavior which results in continued Twitter penalties or suspensions, complaints from third-party users, or which we deem to be spam-like, will be terminated.