The Tit-for-Tat Spam Controversy
As Twitter has grown in popularity, there have been a number of different tools built to measure the reach and influence of Twitter users. There’s Twitterholic, which maintains a list of the 100 most popular Twitter users based on number of Followers. As of today, Barack Obama is at the top with over 105,000 followers.
And more recently we’ve seen the introduction of TwinFluence and Twitter Grade. Personally, I don’t care for these measurement tools because they turn Twitter into a contest and encourage people to accumulate followers for the sole purpose of appearing on one of these lists or improving their score. I recently came across someone named “The Busy Brain” who experimented with a way to boost his Followers count earlier this week. The experiment ended up backfiring for him but it led to some very interesting discussion.
He described his technique for accumulating new followers in this blog post:
First – Follow Me and then close that window! Next, go to my Twitter Followers page and go through the list contacts and “follow” ALL of them! Each and every one of them! You will see your work paying off within seconds, as many of the people will follow you within a few moments! Keep your email opened and refreshed! I am willing to bet… you will get an extremely high percentage of return followers because of my “Tit-for-Tat” pruned list theory!I do ask ONE THING…
PLEASE!… If you do use this method and generate good success, PLEASE linkback to this Article! Either via a Tweet or Blog posting
This blog posted generated a tremendous amount of discussion (67 comments as of the writing of this blog post). The comments started out positive but eventually turned negative as people who where following him started to get inundated with New Follower notifications from people who were complete strangers with nothing in common. Here are a few of the negative comments:
Following this tactic makes Twitter spammy, something that nobody wants. As someone has mentioned, I hope that someone follows me because they are interested in what I have to say, not expecting a follow-back. I will only follow people back after I read through their tweets, check out their page, etc. The most appealing beauty about twitter is not the micro-blogging aspect, but the social aspect. If you are going to follow someone you have no intention of interracting with, then why do it? They probably aren’t interested in your topics either. I think you get the gist here.
Here’s a better, strategically refined solution. Visit www.search.twitter.com and search for terms that you write about. See who’s tweeting about those topics and engage with them on a 1-on-1 basis. Yes, it may take a little longer, but you may find yourself with a more loyal, and interesting following.
What you are doing is a mockery of Twitter. And you ARE actually harming something. You are lowering the quality of this medium, which with all its downsides still has a quality way above the par compared with the other social networks.
You might believe that this new influx of followers is helping you, you might believe that you are increasing your exposure, but all that you are managing to do is to transform yourself into a noise source. As a credit to you though, this entire controversy does have a positive effect on your business, due to the debate it encouraged. This positive effect however will be short lived and none of it will pass on to the users foolish enough to follow your advice.
… I have to cast my lot more or less with those saying this technique “misses the point.”
For one, i feel slightly “used” in that those of us who’ve decided to politely follow folks back, are suddenly getting connected with people who are just in it to jack up their numbers. No big deal, just, meh.
But more to why I say “missing the point” it’s a matter of maybe not thinking through the results of this. Will the follower numbers you end up with really serve your goals in the end? Maybe so, maybe likely, no.
The slow organic growth of a network here lets you get to know people. I’ve found the periods of rapid growth caused me to miss a lot of genuine opportunities to really meet people within the streams. Jumping into 600 streams at once, I really have to wonder how many people adding those 600 will ever really *see* any of those 600. How much incremental traffic will it really drive, and how many of those Twitter connections will last if they were done “just to connect” instead of because there was some interest in the contents and or person.
There was even a video comment:
That video comments wins extra style points for the cool hat.
To The Busy Brain’s credit, he didn’t delete any of the negative comments. He even put up a poll asking his readers what they thought of the “Tit-for-Tat” following technique that he was using. As of today, 50% thought it was a horrible idea and only 19% thought it was a great idea. 30% were undecided.
The next day, The Busy Brain issued an apology to the Twitter community.
I originally put the poll up to prove the point to the negative commenters in the post that majority were in favor, but was surprised to see the numbers quickly sway the other direction. Certainly not what I had hoped for! Oddly only about 5% of the people who saw the poll actually voted. I’m not sure why that is!The simple fact is, I had no clue that this would turn into such a big mess! My attempts to put out the fires of hatred and spite are completely SPENT! I’m done trying! Hence this appology!
I’m a hard working, home owning, family oriented individual pursuing the American Dream! I had NO INTENT of inconveniencing the gracious folks who originally followed me! To them, and ANYONE who felt they were done wrong by this situation… I AM HONESTLY VERY SORRY!
You can read the complete apology here.
There’s no doubt that everyone uses Twitter in different ways. Many people carefully cultivate their community, making sure to only connect with people who they know or people who have some shared interestt in. Others are trying to build a large audience with little regard for whether or not they have anything in common with their followers. Was The Busy Brain’s Tit-for-Tat technique spam? It’s hard to say. But the poll results surely indicate that this technique is not going to win you fans and could end up doing damage to your personal brand.
Update:
I changed the headline of this post to ‘The Tit-for-Tat Spam Controversy’. I really don’t think The Busy Brain’s intent was to spam and I regret labeling him as a spammer in the original headline.
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