Stop Twitter Spam

The Twitter support team has announced that they are in the process of removing suspended accounts from everyone’s followers lists.  Twitter posted the news on the Twitter Status Blog and on Get Satisfaction.  From the Get Satisfaction update:

A long awaited bug fix is going out this week: suspended accounts are being removed from everyone’s “followers” pages.

Expect to see an extreme drop in followers numbers in many cases, as we’ve suspended thousands of accounts for spam over the past few months. Your followers number will now accurately reflect the number of legitimate followers you have on Twitter.

and later in the comments:

…the bug is fixed but the removal of suspended profiles from followers pages will be gradual. In other words, suspended accounts wont vanish from everyone’s followers page at the exact same time; this will happen to different people on different days.

So what does this mean to you?  This will most likely result in a very noticeable drop in your Followers count.  My Followers went from 310 to 292 – a 6% drop.

Many people are obsessed with the number of people who are following them and I’m expecting that this will cause some people to complain and assume that Twitter screwed something up.  For those of us who were aware of this bug, this is good news and another indicator that Twitter is taking their war on spam very seriously.

Coverage elsewhere:

• Venture Beat: Your friends don’t hate you, Twitter is just cleaning house again

Update:

The Twitter community is starting to notice the drop in followers.  Quite a few people think that the drop in followers is because of something that they said.  Here are some of the reactions that I’ve seen…

When building a base of followers, don’t go out and spam huge groups of people and hope they follow you. That’s a pretty unauthentic way to dialogue with consumers. On the other hand, we monitor for conversations about us and then follow those people and hope they follow us because we know they are interested. We have found they are usually glad to have us reach out to them.

- Neal Stewart (Flying Dog Brewery) – iMedia: How to be a Twitter all-star

In Kawasaki’s most recent twitter post, he says:

“If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading. If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.”

It’s truly my belief (and hey, I may be wrong, it happens sometimes) that all the people using twitter as a Guy Kawasaki commercial are talking to each other, and it’s the people who are talking about cats and Starbucks – and telling dick jokes – that are making the truly important connections.

- A Big Victory – Twitter, Spam, and Dick Jokes

Several weeks ago, Guy Kawasaki came up with a new way to market his Alltop site through Twitter.  He describes this in a post that he wrote today titled How To Use Twitter As a Twool.

Twitterfeed is a service where any RSS feed can automatically appear as your own tweets. Bloggers do this, for example, so that their blog posts automatically appear as their tweets.I took it to the next level by asking Mario Menti, the Twitterfeed creator, to make a special webpage where people could sign up to allow us to automatically post Alltop news as their tweets (click here if you’d visit the webpage). Approximately 177 people did so.

I want to make sure you understand what this means: 177 people agreed to repost all Alltop news as their own tweets. This took automated tweeting to a historical new high—or low depending on who you asked.

Then my new book, Reality Check, came out, and I made an offer of a free copy of it to anyone who signed up for the Alltop Twitterfeed. Another 280 people signed up—bringing the total to approximately 450 people.

We counted, and these 450 people had a total of 140,000 followers. This meant that whenever we announced a new topic, the 140,000 followers of 450 people received notification. These 450 people had followers in common, so their tweets didn’t reach 140,000 different people (see next section), but this was the Mother of Retweeting.

This approach brought some immediate criticism to Guy.  A few weeks ago, Kevin Hendricks picked a fight with Guy (his words) and explained why he objected to people blindly tweeting about Alltop.

It’s essentially handing over the keys to your platform and ceding your voice to a commercial. A handful of people I follow on Twitter signed up when Kawasaki offered a signed copy of his new book. I started to notice when I saw friends posting tweets about stuff they normally didn’t talk about:

Is it stork time?: http://pregnancy.alltop.com is for you.

Mostly for lawyers: Electronic Discovery news: http://ediscovery.alltop.com

If you love bags, you’ll love this site: http://bags.alltop.com

And then different friends tweeting the exact same thing. I smelled a skunk. And it was Kawasaki.

Why It’s Lame
I understand the allure of a free book. A signed book, no less. (Note: Not everyone signed up for the free book.) And Alltop is a cool site worth talking about. But my problem is that it’s not authentic conversation. If you want to tell me about Alltop, do it in your own words. Otherwise it’s spam.

For Alltop this means all they care about is spreading the word. As Kawasaki asked me, “What’s lame about 450 people helping me reach 125,000 others?” Apparently big numbers trump real conversation.

For my Twitter friends who signed up this means they’re flushing their voice and their hard-earned respect down the toilet. They’ve sold access to their followers for a book. For as much as the new media marketers talk about permission based marketing and earning the right to be heard, this boggles my mind. It’s the antithesis of authentic. You didn’t earn your right to be heard just to hand it over to some company commercial.

I agree with Kevin on this one.  I have no problem with Guy using Twitter to market Alltop on his own Twitter account.  But it just doesn’t make sense to have hundreds of people blindly tweeting the same content.  As Guy acknowledged, this approach resulted in people seeing the same Alltop tweets from people who decided to sign up for this.  Like many others, I started to unfollow people who were tweeting about Alltop on behalf of Guy.  And Kevin and I aren’t the only ones who find this annoying.  Here are a few reactions pulled from this Twitter search.

sonecessary: It happened again… Three identical Alltop spam tweets on my feed show up at the same time. Unfollowed one… Who’s next?

raincoaster: This alltop spam is moving my mouse towards the Unfollow button. I’ll take it from Kawasaki. I won’t take it from 18 or 20 of his elves too

YatPundit: @audreychernoff sorry, but you do alltop spam, and I choose to opt out of promoting kawasaki.

ChristopherGurr: Sorry about the very spam-like alltop feed. As soon as I get to a laptop connection, I’ll take care of it.

dbyler: @guykawasaki You may think it’s not spam, but when ppl start unfollowing those who spew Alltop ads, there’s a problem http://bit.ly/RJHo

To Guy’s credit, he listened to the negative feedback and offered an alternate way for people to evangelize Alltop.  The alternate approach is an email newsletter that alerts people about new topics on Twitter.  A “Post to Twitter” link had been added to each Alltop page so that people can manually retweet topics (versus having them automatically tweeted using a bot).  Much better.

According to Guy’s post today, only 50 people out of 450 have dropped the automated Twitterfeed tool in favor of the new email newsletter.

We told the 450 people using Twitterfeed about it, so that they could drop the Twitterfeed mechanism and use the email notification instead. We opened up the email list on the night before Thanksgiving and in six days approximately 600 people signed up for it. That was surprisingly high, but what’s even more interesting is that only fifty of the 450 Twitterfeed folks stopped doing it.

Some final thoughts on this:

• If you’re still using the Alltop Twitterfeed, please do us all a favor: turn it off and sign up for the email newsletter
• Twitter is not just a numbers game.  Make sure that your tweets are authentic and represent your voice. I can’t think of any reason why you should hand your Twitter content over to an automated bot that is tweeting someone else’s content.  It’s a guaranteed way to confuse the people who are following you and you will end up losing followers, not gaining them.