Is the Twitter Quality Filter Going to Impact Your Ministry?

If you haven’t read the post by Meghan that came out on the Twitter update, catch it here. Many believe this is a result of the harassment on social media and the fact that Facebook’s feed is perceived to be better for users and for the company monetarily.

My first impressions of the new Twitter updates, I expressed in the comments section of Meghan’s post:

I think this could be a game changer if adopted, but people use Twitter because they don’t like Facebook’s newsfeed so I don’t see that part of the audience using it. But maybe the fear of your content not getting shared will have some churches do better on social media. Maybe.

I figured I should write a follow up article to Meghan’s on who I believe is going to struggle with this change to one of the most popular social media platforms out there. If you know a church, share this with them. I don’t want to see bad social media being done for organizations with such important causes.

Here is a list of types of church and individual tweets that the quality filter will hurt:

• The Church Who Is Too Promotional
  While the quality filter is not going to remove your third party tweets that you schedule out, if you tend to tweet the same thing over and over with very small changes, you will be penalized. This includes all Christian bloggers who post the same “Check out this article” tweet, we probably will never see your tweets ever again. That means you need to change your marketing strategy. (Something you probably should have done before a filter was ever implemented).
• Low-Quality Tweets
  This one is more ambiguous as I do not have access to Twitter’s algorithm of what is “low quality,” but I have to imagine that churches and Christians who send out mass posts in a single day with little to no engagement are going to be hit pretty hard.
• For Churches Who Are Not Social
  In a conversation with Steven Earp, he shares “I think it will be great for everyone who uses social media platforms for the intended purpose – to be social and interact with people. I think for ministries that use social media as little more than another place to post announcements, it will render them increasingly irrelevant.”
• Users Who Use Multiple Tweets For One Thought Regularly
  Have a church potluck that you announce over 5 different tweets and only one of those shows up in someone’s feed? Not going to cut it. You’ll need to up your game on Twitter.

What other types of tweets do you see getting removed by the quality filter?

Jeremy Smith

Jeremy is owner of ChurchAndMentalHealth.com and the Co-Occurring Program Coordinator and a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor at a community mental health center. Jeremy has a history of working as a ministry director for Youth for Christ for 8 years and then working as a mental health and substance use adult counselor in Colorado and Ohio, specifically running an Opioid Residential Treatment Center.