Forecast says:
More Social Spam is on it’s way.
Social networking is about building your lists, building your groups and your lists of followers, so I started doing some research this evening while passively watching my Twitter stream updates through TwitterFox, a handy little Firefox addon.
The first thing I came across was an article on DoshDosh.com How To Get More Twitter Followers – which is an informative, lengthy, and indepth article.
I’m a reformed spammer, and, like a ex-smoker, I chant the virtues of not spamming all the time. (watch for the upcoming podcast “How I made 30k as a spammer, and why I stopped”) So, I was curious to learn about tools from DoshDosh, like the Twitter Blacklist and Twerpscan, that have been developed to help Twitter users weed out people who try to follow many users in order to build an large audience.
DoshDosh quoted statistics on “Following Others As A Strategy To Gain Followers”:
Take for instance, Osen Komura. A fake profile set up by another Twitter user in February 2008 as a social experiment. The Osen account followed 41,798 Twitter users in one month and 7,847 users added him as a friend, a 17%+ follow-back rate…
DoshDosh goes on to say
Apart from the risk of being labeled a Twitter spammer and increasing the noise on your Twitter stream, this method still works.
Note: The strategy is completed when the spam account stops following almost everyone on it’s list, changes the profile name to seem like a real person, and starts to recommend product reviews that go through affiliate links, etc.,
Another source, Problogger, makes some good, standard social ettiquette suggestions to help correctly befriend people, such as joining in on the conversation, replying to people, and to leverage other people’s larger profiles by commenting on their tweets – but his most important comment to me, in his 5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence, was to tweet during peek times when other people are actively watching. This may seem logical and obvious, but important to consider when scheduling.
While both articles were great reads, I took more time to read the replies to the posts that I did to read the original posts!
The most common thread to the conversation that followed, echoed the closing advice that most of the top bloggers recommended:
- be real, be yourself, and get involved with your niche in an active, positive, helpful way.
- Comment on other people’s thoughts more often than you talk about yourself – and keep on theme.
- Utilize other website profiles and blogs to send people to your Twitter feed.
- Be patient, and build your follower list by offering value to their twitter experience.
READER WARNING:
In the future, the Social Media sites will become better at filtering spammers, HOWEVER, the appeal of a 17% response rate in building a permission based list is fantastic – and this will ensure that, in the short term, we can all expect to see a lot more Social Spam coming our way.
Follow me on Twitter! http://www.twitter.com/douglaslampi
Cheers
