Alternatively, allow Twitter staff to decide whether an account is ‘spammy’ or not based on where the links are headed. If they’re all heading to whatever.gov.uk, they’re more likely to be ignored than onlinepharmacy.co.uk

It all comes down to the enforcement, I guess. Twitter have bigger fish to fry than councils, and there’s enough major corporations using bot-fuelled feeds who’d kick up a fuss in the event of mass banning that it’s unlikely they’d consider it.

Nonetheless, the new rules provide a wake-up call to councils, encouraging them to think about how they can move towards using social media for more meaningful, two-way engagement.

Longer term I think we’ll see more councils recruiting dedicated social media officers who can take on that task.

But until then the job falls to already overstretched council web and comms teams. Lacking dedicated resources to manage social media means they have little choice but to take the less personal approach, and/or rely on automated feeds.

Most of the time, council accounts are going to be way under Twitter’s radar, only multiple blocks or spam reports are going to flag them up and that’ll only happen if a lot of people on Twitter *really* hate the council!

(otherwise you get into the realm of egotweeting/ telling people what you had for breakfast – see some of @SadiqKhan – he is praised as ‘connecting with people’ but he is my MP and I just find it dull!)

Obviously there are exceptions but usually links are the most intersting tweets esp given the 140 limit.

as I commented on Stuart’s post about this it’s actually not new. I found this out when setting up @PubSecBloggers .

From all that I’ve read we are all dependent on Twitter’s good will but it’s also worth remembering that it is possible to accidentally break the T&Cs in other ways than this one.