Photo via: http://stopautodm.com/
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
How are you using Twitter for business?
