Stop Twitter Spam

I saw some interesting comments about Twitter on an SEO blog called saponews:

…if you do decide to spend your time and effort promoting your brand on twitter then you will have a big shock in store. If you have not already heard most of the twitter users are very loyal to the site, so if you start constantly posting to them you are probably most likely to get classed as a spammer and eventually banned. More so if you do not get banned is it really worth the time and effort to drive useless traffic to your site. Twitter traffic is believed to have a massive 93% bounce rate to your business. I can tell you for sure that I would rather spend my valuable time building up my online presence in a more ethical way.

So from a marketing perspective it is warned that you should stay well clear from using twitter. Ok you may be able to get your brand name out but is that how you want your company to be remembered. “Oh I know that site, there the ones that spammed me on twitter”. Do you want your company to be labelled as a spam business? I didn’t think so. Stop using twitter for promotion and use it as a valuable tool to keep up to date with your friends and your websites subscribers.

What I find most interesting about this post on saponews is the acknowledgment that the Twitter community is playing a big part in keeping Twitter relatively spam-free.  This is happening through several different gestures: blocking spammers, reporting spammers to Twitter (@spam), and reporting spammers using the #twitspam hashtag.

Regarding the bounce rate, I don’t have any statistics to back this up but I would expect that the bounce rate for links from Twitter is a lot lower than 93% when the link is from someone who has has built up some credibility.  Also, I don’t think that legitimate marketers should steer clear of Twitter.  It’s no secret that Twitter is a very effective tool for marketing a product or a service as long as you work within Twitter’s culture.  Don’t hit your followers over the head with links back to your web site.  Don’t randomly follow hundreds of people at a time.  Start slowly on Twitter and let people find you.  Talk to them, listen to them when they have problems, and thank them when they say something nice about your product.  Doing these things will do wonders for your brand.

Monetizing your Twitter stream for self gain is – to me – akin to trying to sell off your sister on the street corner for a few bucks to stuff in your back pocket. On the other side of the coin though I could see where this could be a good relationship between Twitter and its users if the in stream advertising was a co-operative deal between the user and Twitter. It would have to have very strong limits in place but I could see a shared ad revenue model for Twitter for in-stream ads where they get to pay back the sugar daddies and we get a few bucks to pay Starbucks with (or to donate to a worthy cause) – but only if we agree to it individually.

Steven Hodson: The Inquisitr – Pimping your Twitter feed
(in reference to new Twitter ad network Magpie)

This is from Practical 101s: Tips For New Twitter Users | davefleet.com

Tip #3: Don’t spam

As Twitter has grown in usage, it has seen a growth in people/companies simply posting automated messages to their account.

In my view, that’s unfortunate and, in most cases, a fruitless attempt to drive traffic using old-school spamming techniques (there are exceptions, for example, BreakingNews or GlobeandMail, which offer good reasons to follow their updates).

Twitter has now set up a spam account to which people can report spammers, and continues its efforts to fight them. Don’t be one of the people caught.

FYI – the spam account that Dave is referring to is @spam.