No, I Will Not Help Your Business Spam People on Twitter

Posted on December 16, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

Twitter: the little platform that does it all; from marketing, to customer service and sadly, massive amounts of spam. The Twitter platform itself, doesn’t spam, but with various tools using Twitter’s API can allow people to use it for spamming with public tweets and direct messages (DMs). Spam is nothing new in the digital world, we receive millions of spam every day in our email inboxes and it’s an ongoing problem with Twitter. But with recent UI changes and updates, Twitter spam has seemed to decrease.

My LinkedIn inbox saw an unfortunate occurrence this week. I received a message from someone asking if I could help them with something that I not only consider spamming on Twitter but also to find the best tool to automate the process of creating a Twitter account for business purposes. Here’s a screenshot of the LinkedIn message. Some information has been grayed out to protect the guilty.

The individual basically wanted to launch a Twitter marketing strategy the following ways:

1. auto follow targeted people
2. Send auto DM’s
3. Target followers by region
4. Auto or easily unfollow users who do not follow back

Now I will confess and say that I have used various tools myself and for others to auto follow people on Twitter by location and keyword but I have NEVER pulled an auto-follow and then unfollow just for subscribers. Also I have NEVER sent Auto DMs to my followers or any Twitter account that I have managed. My response to this person was “Hello, thanks for contacting me, yes there is software that will allow you to reach your goals but it’s a practice that I do not recommend or suggest to others using Twitter.”

As more businesses continue to use Twitter for marketing and more social media practitioners are born every day, I hope this is not a sign of the times, as we move into 2010, of businesses who are looking to implement Twitter as a part of their existing marketing efforts. Maybe I’m being a little hard, but as you can see, this person is a consultant for a client and that brings me to another point. Yes, social media is about sharing and you can find a lot of free help online including Twitter itself. But if you’re working for a business or if you’re a business and would like consulting, that’s something I do at Twine Interactive and we can setup a conference call or a strategy session so you can get the best value out of your time and money. But to the person who sent me the LinkedIn message: if you find this blog post, there is a Twitter app store called OneForty.com

Reference link: Twitter 101 Advice for Companies: “Don’t spam people”

*Disclaimer: I have no business investment with OneForty.com

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About the Author

Written by Wayne Sutton

Wayne is the business development/marketing strategist for TriOut and partner at OurHashtag. For more, follow SocialWayne.com on Twitter, Buzz, and Facebook. Also check out the SocialWayne Podcast in iTunes. See all posts by Wayne Sutton.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under Featured, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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December 16, 2009

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John Rees said:

I like the wording of your response back to the requester. I am not sure I’d have been so polite. They will probably do what they want anyway, but hopefully others will see your point and think twice about this type of marketing.
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December 16, 2009

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Chris Moody said:

My favorite is when a social media consultant/expert has an auto-DM. It it a bit ironic to me.
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December 16, 2009

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Wayne Sutton said:

Thanks for the comments guys. Yes Chris I’ve seen those.

John yeah that wasn’t my first type response but I had to clean it up a little.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

Wayne Sutton - 16. Dec, 2009
New blog post: No, I Will Not Help Your Business Spam People on Twitter http://socialwayne.com/p1b3
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Chris Decker - 16. Dec, 2009
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Wayne Sutton helps individuals, startups and businesses succeed in understanding how to communicate on the social web via brand strategy, social networks and location-based services. Wayne is the business development/marketing strategist for TriOut and partner at OurHashtag.