Usually not my style if you read my posts regularly, but here is a rant on Twitter spammers.
It has taken a long time to grow my followers on Twitter. I don’t have that many and I follow fewer. The number of followers is vastly lower than the number that signed up to follow me to begin with. Some of this has to do with how I use Twitter in general. I converse with those that I find interesting (small number) and lurk on those that seem to always point out great posts. TweetDeck is my preferred tool it it helps me track and bucket to keep things organized.
The problem I have is the spammers. At first it was comical. ’Trixie’ tries to entice me to follow her with a sexy picture and nothing to say. Sorry, this girl – me – isn’t interested, I’m happily married and my husband even laughed at your picture. Then it became a nuisance with get rich quick schemes using Twitter. Now, I’m starting to feel a bit militant.
The spam reporter on Twitter has become my best friend. Just in the past 15 minutes I have had 9 new followers, some with the same picture and different name, and all spouting how to make money on the internet or Twitter.
Oh wait, now there is 10 – one just came in…
It has been this way ever since I posted legitimate news of revenue generation using social media. Maybe they think I’ll be their new best friend and promote their trash. Or, maybe they think I blog and Tweet for money or want to, which couldn’t be further than the truth.
What concerns me is that I miss too many of these spammers, or ones that are more sophisticated and harder to spot. I worry that that this causes people that I actually want to follow me and maybe follow and communicate with to not follow, unfollow, block, or even report me as a spammer. The reason I say this is I look at the people that follow me. I want to see that there is something to share and gain from the connection. I look not only at people’s tweets but, I also look at their profiles, companies, and the people they follow.
Oh god, another one just came in…
I’m a marketer and work at an agency so I ‘get’ the need for promotion and advertising. I know there are the spammers out their that haven’t got a clue they actually are the bane of my industry’s existence. It is the one’s that clearly are bottom feeders that make Twitter at times unbearable.
That makes 12…
I’d given the benefit of the doubt to some as everyone has had to learn how to use Twitter and make it effective for them. Although, at this point, I’m glad Twitter has grown up and provided spam blocking. I don’t need to grow my follower list beyond quality connections. I also want to protect my reputation as a non-spammer. I guess with every marketing communication tool out there you get the spammers. I just wish my follower list and email box wasn’t full of it. What concerns me mostly is that Twitter becomes obsolete as a network because of the spammers. I’d hate to think that Twitter could turn into another MySpace.
13 just came in…
Looks like a long day of cleaning my Twitter follower list.
Filed under: social media, Twitter
Right you are! I use TweetDeck’s block-and-report tool, but first, while they can still receive my tweets, I do two things:
1. I visit their profile to make sure they weren’t the victim of a hijack (several times, you see a pattern of great tweets supplanted at the top by junk)–if they have, I warn them to change logons and delete the junk.
2. If they’re a genuine spammer (can spammers EVER be genuine?), I send a tweet like “@idiot I block and report spammers. Bye!” – so others can proactively block them.
Shel:
I wish there were things that could convince spammers that what they do is not worth it. The only issue is that they do get something out of it – people do buy in. Especially now with high unemployment and people losing their homes some think there are ways to make easy money. I’d thought of putting out the names of those that were in my follower list and decided against it. I’d rather not give them the fame. It feeds into their tactic. I also think that contacting them may not work either as I think they send but don’t watch what comes back to them. In the end, I don’t want the association and try to keep it out of my tweets and follower list. Sorry state – thus the rant.
I hope what you do works. I’m certainly with you in my disdain.