GroupTweet allows our users to format their tweets exactly how they want them. The default format for a GroupTweet is to add “via @contributor” to the end of the GroupTweet. This allows your followers to know exactly which one of your contributors sent each specific Tweet from your account. You can see in the screenshot below, we have several built in Tweet format options as well as a “custom” option which gives you full control of how your GroupTweets will look. We will refer to these different options as various “contributor signatures”. If you choose the “message only” option, then you will be hiding the contributor signature altogether.
Introducing Smart Contributor Signatures
If you are using either the Native Twitter Retweet or “Message Only” Tweet formats, this change will not impact you. However for our users that want to identify exactly which contributor is sending each Tweet, these new smart contributor signatures will greatly improve your experience as well as your Twitter follower’s experience.
A common problem we’ve seen is when a contributor sends a long tweet, then oftentimes the appended “contributor signature” puts the tweet over the 140 character limit. Previously we would just cut off the contributor signature wherever it was needed to fit under 140 characters. That would result in odd looking tweets being published from your account, as seen in the example below.
Omaha Police officer Dave Staskiewicz sent this Tweet. However you can see below that his contributor signature is cutoff. Instead of displaying “^OPDOfcStaskiewicz”, it only displays as “^OPDOfcSta”. This is because the Tweet below is exactly 140 characters. There is no more room for the full contributor signature to be displayed as “^OPDOfcStaskiewicz”.
Happy Independence Day from Southeast Precinct!
Please drive safe and be nice to each other today Omaha.#opd #southeastprecinct ^OPDOfcSta pic.twitter.com/FqgB2OK1FQ
— Omaha Police Dept (@OmahaPolice) July 4, 2017
As you can see above, this doesn’t look very clean or professional. We apologize!
How will Tweets look now?!
Our new solution makes this look a lot better! Instead of simply cutting the signature off in the middle of the contributors name, we now we will remove the entire signature ONLY when necessary. We think this results in a much cleaner looking Tweet! See below for another example from the GroupTweet user @OmahaPolice. In this example, @OPDVanessa sent the following Tweet:
Thank you @GoodwillOmaha for the cookies & support. #OPD looks forward to working together to reach our youth. We appreciate you! pic.twitter.com/TjKSc13RUt
— Vanessa Urbach (@OPDVanessa) July 18, 2017
Normally, we would simply add on ^OPDVanessa to the end of that Tweet when its published from the @OmahaPolice account. However in this case, that would have put that Tweet at 141 characters (over the 140 limit). So instead of cutting off the last “a” in Vanessa from the signature, we remove the entire “^OPDVanessa” signature, as seen below, when GroupTweet publishes the Tweet from the @OmahaPolice account:
Thank you @GoodwillOmaha for the cookies & support. #OPD looks forward to working together to reach our youth. We appreciate you! pic.twitter.com/258AlH8YUM
— Omaha Police Dept (@OmahaPolice) July 18, 2017
In these cases, your followers won’t know exactly which contributor sent the specific tweet. However, this will ONLY happen in cases when there is not room for the full contributor signature. We believe that displaying the Tweet just like any other normal tweet is a better and cleaner solution than randomly cutting off characters from the contributor signature.
Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Hi, I'm Ryan Craft, Co-Founder of GroupTweet.com. GroupTweet allows you to add multiple contributors to a single Twitter account - creating a seamless group Twitter experience. Want to learn more? Click here for some examples or reach out via Twitter, you can find me @craft_ryan