In April, 2019 we launched a new feature called webhooks.

A webhook is a URL that is unique to a specific social account or queue in your user account, which external services, apps, or your own software can use to automatically create scheduled posts or queue posts.

For developers, it means our service now has a very easy-to-use API to automatically create scheduled posts and queue posts.

For end users, using a free service such as ifttt.com, here are just a few examples of how you can now source posts:

• Read several RSS feeds and merge their posts into one stream of scheduled and queue posts.
• Read an email account of yours and convert emails, or a selection of emails, into scheduled and queue posts.
• Read a Facebook account and create scheduled and queue posts from the Facebook posts.

On March 30, 2019, we removed integration to medium.com from our service.

We launched a major upgrade to our service on Sunday, March 17, 2019, and it has an impact on affiliates.

The upgrade includes a completely different affiliate system.

Very important, your existing affiliate links will not function after March 17, 2019. You will have to register a new affiliate account, and start using a new affiliate link. The details are available in the Affiliates section of the upgraded version of the service.

Active referrals in the old (legacy) version of the service that are currently generating recurring commissions for you will continue to generate commissions as before. We are maintaining the legacy version of the service parallel to the upgraded service for the foreseeable future. New referrals and additional recurring commissions will not be possible in the legacy version.

Please submit a support request at https://support.socialoomph.com if you have any questions.

On Sunday, March 17th, 2019, we launched an upgraded version of our service and website.

Summary Of Changes

Here is a summary of the changes that were made:

1. The existing website that was located at www.socialoomph.com changed its domain name to legacy.socialoomph.com.
   Users with active subscriptions (paid accounts) can continue to log in and use the old (legacy) website until they cancel and terminate their subscriptions.
   New accounts registrations and upgrades are disabled at legacy.socialoomph.com. In other words, free accounts cannot be upgraded, and when a paid subscription terminates it cannot be renewed in the legacy service.
2. We added several new social networks to the upgraded service. In total the upgraded service supports thirteen social platforms.
3. We narrowed the focus of SocialOomph to only the scheduling and publishing of social posts and blog posts.
4. To use the upgraded service, you will need to register a new account at http://www.socialoomph.com.
5. We added team cooperation features, including review and approval of posts depending of the role of the team member.
6. We added video uploads where appropriate, for example, Facebook pages and Twitter profiles.
7. We introduced a new pricing structure with more tiers and expansion options.
8. There is a new affiliate system, which means existing affiliates will need to again register as an affiliate and use a completely different affiliate link. Existing affiliate links will not work with the upgraded version of the service.

FAQ

Does the upgraded service have a free trial?

Yes, the upgraded service has a 30-day free trial.

Does the upgraded service have a free account option?

Yes, there is a basic free account in the upgraded version.

Can I transfer my existing user account to the new version?

We don’t offer the transfer of the entire user account from the old version to the new version as an option. The differences in technical configuration and business rules between the two versions prohibit that. However, you can download your posts in the old version and then bulk upload them in the new version.

I have a free account in the legacy version. Can I continue to use it?

You will be able to use your legacy free account only for 30 days following the upgrade on March 17th. Meaning, on April 17th you will not be able to log in to the free user account in the legacy version of the service.

I have a paid account in the legacy version. How long will I be able to use it?

You will be able to use the paid account in the legacy version until your paid subscription terminates for whatever reason and your account is downgraded to a free account. Thereafter you will need to start using a new account in the upgraded version of the service.

With a legacy paid account, what is the recommended migration process?

Register a new account in the new version, activate the 30-day free trial, and try out the features to see if you want to completely migrate from the legacy version.

If you decide to migrate to the new version, download your updates in the legacy version, and upload them in the new version. Then cancel your subscription in the legacy version.

If you don’t want to migrate, do not cancel your subscription in the legacy version and just continue using your legacy account.

I used the free trial in the legacy service. Can I use the 30-day free trial of the upgraded service?

Yes, you will be able to use the 30-day free trial of the upgraded service.

Will you cancel my legacy subscription if I register an account in the new service and use it?

No, we will not cancel your subscription in the legacy version.

Will the users of the legacy version still be supported?

Yes, absolutely. They will receive exactly the same user support as users of the new service. No exceptions.

Can I use the same Facebook application credentials and Pinterest application credentials in the new version?

Yes, you do not need to create new Facebook or Pinterest applications. The same application credentials that you used in the legacy version can be used in the new version.

Can I use my existing affiliate link?

No, you will need to again register as an affiliate and use the new affiliate link. Please read the affiliate page.

Will I continue to receive my affiliate commission that is generated by transactions in the legacy version?

Yes, you will continue to receive affiliate commissions that accrue in the legacy version.

When will you close down the legacy version?

There is no specific time frame for closing down the legacy version. We will give you at least 90 days notice should we decide to close down the legacy version.

Where can I get more information?

Please send us a support request with your questions. We will be happy to help.

Duplicate Content

Twitter’s rules state that users are not allowed to use the Twitter API to post “duplicative or substantially similar content”.

Very clear. Or, is it?

What exactly constitutes duplicative or substantially similar content? Is up to 90% similar acceptable? Or is the acceptable level more towards 50% similar? And for what period of time is one not allowed to post a similar tweet? An hour? A day? A week? Never?

Unfortunately Twitter does not provide any of that information. They leave up it to each developer and user of the API to separately try and figure out how to comply with their rules.

At SocialOomph we’ve decided to implement the following rule to discourage duplicate and similar content for Twitter:

At tweet, or a very similar version of that tweet, can be published only once every 48 hours from within your SocialOomph user account.

In other words, if you have three Twitter accounts connected to your user account, you can publish a tweet (or similar version of the tweet) to only one of the Twitter accounts once every 48 hours.

If we find it necessary to amend the rule in the future, we will let you know via another blog post.

We apply the rule just before our system sends the tweet to Twitter for publication. In other words, you will not get a warning or rejection when you schedule the tweet or upload the tweet. You will only see the rejection in the list of updates after the scheduled time of publication passed.

Rejected tweets will not land you in trouble with Twitter, because Twitter would not even know that you tried to publish the tweet. We stop and reject the tweet before it is sent to Twitter.

This rule applies only to tweets that are published by our service directly to your Twitter profile. The rule does not apply to posts that you schedule for Facebook or LinkedIn.

Mentions

We’ve decided to implement a rule to discourage @mention spam.

A particular @mention can be published from your user account no more than once every 24 hours.

If you have any @mentions in a tweet that have already been been published in another tweet originating from your user account (regardless of the Twitter account where the @mention was published) during the preceding 24 hours, we remove the “@” character from those mentions, just before we send the tweet to Twitter for publication.

In other words, a particular @mention can be published once every 24 hours to only one of the Twitter accounts that are connected to your user account.

This rule applies only to tweets that are published by our service directly to your Twitter profile.

Hashtags

We’ve decided to implement a rule to discourage #hashtag spam.

A particular #hashtag can be published from your user account no more than once every 60 minutes.

If you have any #hashtags in a tweet that have already been been published in another tweet originating from your user account (regardless of the Twitter account where the #hashtag was published) during the preceding 60 minutes, we remove the “#” character from those hashtags, just before we send the tweet to Twitter for publication.

In other words, a particular #hashtag can be published once every 60 minutes to only one of the Twitter accounts that are connected to your user account.

This rule applies only to tweets that are published by our service directly to your Twitter profile.

Implementation

These rules will be implemented in full by no later than Wednesday, October 17, 2018.

Dream World

In an ideal dream world, Twitter would have implemented automated abuse prevention rules in their Twitter API, which would have examined each incoming tweet and rejected it if it were unacceptable, for whatever reason, via decisions governed by secret and proprietary rules. Duplicate content (whatever that means)? Reject it. Spamming hashtags (whatever that means)? Reject it.

Instead, here we are and the coffee is cold.

With immediate effect we are now removing hashtags from the text of scheduled tweets.

Edited Oct 12: With immediate effect we are now removing all but the first two hashtags from the text of scheduled tweets. Meaning, tweet text can contain a maximum of two hashtags.

Edited Oct 12: The removal takes place at the time of publication, where we remove all “#” characters but the first two hashtags from the tweet text before we submit the text to Twitter’s API for publication.

Edited Oct 12: In other words, the tweet “It is a #beautiful #morning! #happy” will be published on your Twitter account as “It is a #beautiful #morning! happy”.

In SocialOomph, you will still see the hashtags as you entered them when you created the scheduled tweet.

Twitter staff warned us that our service was being abused by people who were including unrelated and/or trending topic hashtags in their tweets, which is in violation of Twitter’s rules.

Since Twitter does not provide an API endpoint against which one can check for embargoed hashtags, our only recourse was to remove all most hashtags from tweets published by our service.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

On April 24, 2018, Facebook announced that they were removing the publish_actions Facebook API permission.

The publish_actions permission was required to perform offline publishing of Facebook posts to personal Facebook profiles and Facebook groups. Offline publishing means “without user intervention,” such as future-dated Facebook posts scheduled in our service and other comparable services.

The removal of the permission means that we will now be able to publish your scheduled posts only to Facebook pages of which you are an administrator. We cannot any longer publish posts to Facebook profiles and groups.

This change affects all third-party services that use the Facebook Graph API.

Twitter informed us that providing follow features greatly increases the risk of an application being auto-sanctioned (restricted or suspended).

On March 5, 2018 our application was auto-restricted by Twitter algorithms because their system was observing elevated spam reports on Twitter accounts where SocialOomph executed a follow API call. In other words, account @user_one followed, via SocialOomph, @user_two, and subsequently @user_two submitted a spam report to Twitter to complain about @user_one.

This auto-restriction did not only impact our calls to the follow API endpoints, it prevented us from making any write operations to the API, including publishing tweets.

This restriction severely impacted thousands of our users for several hours, until Twitter Platform staff responded to our support requests, explained the reason for the auto-restriction, and then lifted the restriction.

Providing superior scheduling features has always been our core competency, and we’re not willing to retain features in the service that might, and almost certainly will, negatively impact that core competency.

Consequently, on March 6, 2018, we removed all follow features from our service. This removed the follow-back, find new people to follow, and following management features.

Twitter Rule Changes

On February 21, 2018 Twitter published new developer rules for automation and the use of multiple Twitter accounts.

The rules basically boil down to this, to the extent that our service is affected:

Do not allow users to select more than one Twitter account when they create a tweet.

We’ve implemented the necessary changes in our service to comply with the new Twitter rules.

Going One Step Further

In addition, we have also implemented the following tweet throttling rule, which applies only to tweets published to Twitter via our service:

Across all the Twitter accounts linked to your SocialOomph account, the same tweet can only be published once every 24 hours (we refer to this as the duplicate content blackout period).

Even though you might still be able to schedule the same tweet to be published to different Twitter accounts in the same rolling 24-hour period, at publishing time we will publish the first copy of the tweet, and then reject any duplicates for 24 hours after that, across all your linked Twitter accounts.

The moral of this story is: Create unique content for Twitter. They hate duplicate content.

New Rules Apply To All Applications

The new Twitter developer rules apply to all applications that use Twitter’s API. If you happen to  find one that still offers multi-account tweet posting capabilities, know that using it violates Twitter’s rules and could result in the suspension of your Twitter account.

Twitter has even removed multi-account posting capabilities from their own product, TweetDeck.

Implementation Date

The above changes to our service went live on February 22, 2018.

Concerns

Please refer any queries or concerns with the new Twitter policy to Twitter Support.

We added Pinterest.com as another social network that you can connect to your SocialOomph user account, and schedule Pins for your Boards. All our much loved scheduling and update sourcing tools, such as recurring updates, queue reservoirs, seasonal updates in queues, RSS feeds, emailing in updates, etc., are available to use with your Pinterest Boards.

For more information on the Pinterest integration and other features, please review our online help at https://www.socialoomph.com/help.

This new feature is available to all our users with a Professional subscription.