Twitterstop

TwitterSpam doesn’t taste that good.

Posted on 27. Apr, 2009 by admin in Books / Resources, TwitterNews

I’ve never really looked at the label of a can of SPAM to find out what it’s made of, but whatever is in there, it’s really good. SPAM goes great with breakfast in the morning next to a few overeasy eggs and maybe even a little pancake syrup. mmm. Make sure you cook the spam in a pan for a little while though.

There is however a couple of forms of SPAM that don’t taste very good, and they come in the form of “direct marketing” tweets and straight up “robot” followers with no avatar or very little followers and one tweet. We get a good number of new followers each week that exhibit the many signs of a typical spammer or “fake” follower. We wanted to share a few of these with you and give you some tips on what to do with them.

TWITTER DIRECT MARKETING

With the rise of more and more applications that help direct specific tweets based on keywords, the Twitter stream is becoming flooded with multiple tweets from one user within seconds of each other. One such application is Twitterhawk, which in essence is a great tool with great features, but if abused, it because a “spamming” tool to many of its recipients.

We personally don’t mind receiving some of the direct marketing tweets, especially if they have some good value. But once it becomes obvious that these automated tweets are the only ones being received by a specific user, with no real human on the other side, we quit following that user and warn others about them. How can you know if someone is a direct marketer:

1. Look for where the tweet is originating from. Right below the tweet, the time the tweet was sent is available along with what application was used to send it. For example, if the tweet originated from someone’s Twitterhawk account, it’ll say “About 3 hours ago from Twitterhawk”.

2. If the only tweets you receive from this person is through their Twitterhawk account, then that’s a good sign that they’re only relying on targeted marketing and never tweet on a more personal level.

3. If this person also posts tweets every 10 seconds, with at least 5 - 10 tweets within a 30 second span, this is definitely a good sign of someone either automating their tweets, or in the case of Guy Kawasaki, has a warehouse full of people posting tweets for him. (ha, not sure if this is the case but it sure seems like it. Read one of our archive articled titled “TwitterPimpin” for more on this: http://twitterstop.com/2009/02/26/twitter-pimpin-and-the-art-of-dictweeting

4. If you suspect that someone is spamming or target marketing and you hate it, simply unfollow them and enjoy your day.

ROBOT TWEETERS

We call these “robot” tweeters because they tweet in a very robotic, impersonal way. Their account seems very suspicious and they don’t provide a whole lot of information about themselves. We should be calling them something else, especially since many of these spammers seem to be females, attempting to drive traffic to a flickr page or porn site. Here’s how you can spot these freakin robots:

1. Their account will not include an avatar photo

2. They will set up an account, but never tweet. These users will have an account that has been set up for months, with only one or two tweets, yet they follow hundreds of other users.

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3. The tweets are links to photo pages that have absolutely nothing to do with the user. The obvious sign would be links to porn or adult related sites.

4. Again, simply choose not to follow such users and if Twitter ever adds a “report as spam” feature, be sure to report these cyborgs.

Of course it was just a matter of time that we began seeing target marketing and a high level of spamming take place through Twitter, but hopefully Twitter is working on solutions to cut down on that and also help users report spam instances. Let us know if this article helps you with your spam encounters.

Article by Hector Garcia: @hectorgarcia

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