The Titans of Twitter Spam Stinkers

Posted on 02. May, 2009 by Dave in EMedia

In the past few weeks something has been awry with Twitter. I’m not talking about the random slowness or your friends over Tweeting every two minutes. And while I wish I could blame it on the big Ashton Kutcher/CNN drive to a million followers, the actual party to blame is a bit more typical — spammers, plain and simple.

Twitter is a great tool for publishers, communities, individuals and brands to connect to people interested in what they have to offer. And typically, for for-profit companies, this means letting your existing user base know that they can now follow you on Twitter. A novel idea of letting people make a conscious decision who to connect with. Plus you can follow others in your industry and get an inside track on the latest news, happenings, events, issues … and a lot more.

But recently, Twitter is starting to get known for something else, a darker side filled with sniveling weasels who are using the site to get free promotion and annoy the %$##N out of everyone. These wonderful companies find their victims by trolling users with certain interests and following them … and then following every freaking person they follow.

It’s easy to know these people are devils in no disguise. Their profile typically has only a few updates, all of which tell you how great their product is. You’ll notice when you view their profile that they are following hundreds of thousands of people, but only a small fraction are following them — so far. Those that are following probably were just confused or dazed, or just not really paying attention.

But today one just put me totally over the top. First they followed my personal account. Then both of the public safety sites’ Twitter accounts I manage. Here’s what I saw when I clicked the link:

So these folks went beyond just the normal spammers. They actually took advantage of the background image to make their own little Web page ad in Twitter. Pretty good deal if you can get it … don’t pay a CPC, don’t pay for ads, just follow everyone you can find who seems to be interested in the fire service and follow them. Boo-ya … click on your ad! Congrats. Oy. Are they breaking some obscure Twitter TOS? Probably not. There are no warnings about not putting big ad backgrounds up. Even the general terms don’t really put many limitations on commercial companies … probably because this is a relatively new but steadily increasing problem (see links below). But there are a few rules attempting to prevent spam here.

But do marketers think doing this really helps their brand? Or are they just counting on the teeny majority of uneducated consumers who will get suckered in? Maybe it’s like the Nigerian Scams, Viagara and Printer Ink eMail spams, where it only takes 0.00001% of the millions they annoy to click through for the spammer to cash in. They are probably targeting the same folks walking around wearing face masks inside their own homes and avoiding ham, bacon and pigs feet because of the Swine flu.

There are actually some smart companies who sell products and services using Twitter with a bit of smarts. They follow you, but their posts are informative about the industry, link to news articles, etc. And occasionally they mention some news about their own company. That isn’t quite as obnoxious, but …

For me, and a lot of people I know, I’m thinking I wasn’t creative enough anyway to get everything in my head down to 140 characters. So if every other follower on Twitter turns out to be spam a few months from now and scares us all away, so be it. So either I’ll just start keeping status updates on Facebook, or more likely something else to kill time and spread peace, love and joy online is probably just around the corner …

Thanks for continuing to ruin the internet you uneducated (or overly spam educated) marketers …

Here are some others talking about Twitter/Tweet Spam …