Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Twitter Spammers Are Getting Traction

The current economy is a chaotic test of bravery and creativity.  At a time when many businesses around the world are hurting and adjusting to the economic realities in an effort to stay alive, the quest to “monetize conversations” within social media has given way to a rise in use of questionable tactics.  We all need to create value and tangible results, how one gets there is the key differentiating factor. 

Since comScore is stating that Twitter traffic hit 10 million visitors as of February of 2009, the stakes are high and climbing. At this pace it’s completely feasible that Twitter will triple to 30 million visitors or more by the end of the year. Given the economic reality and desperate need to drive revenue, I believe more Twitter users will resort to various spamming techniques. The formula for them is simple, get as many followers as possible by any means possible, automated or otherwise and then solely based on volume of followers broadcast or “spam” them into oblivion directing them to a lame product site. Repeat process. Largest challenge? Inventing new Twitter account names.

Despite the best efforts of Evan Williams, Biz Stone and the entire Fail Whale…er Twitter crew, spammers are still prevailing which clearly takes away from the value of influence by watering down the experience.

For example, while writing this post and observing the search term “new to Twitter,” a particular tweet showed up 26 times in just over 30 minutes with 14 of those accounts being most likely fake ones similar to the examples below.

As stated, initially the vast majority of these ReTweets were from starter accounts with no picture, low numbers and only one tweet (shown above) to show for the account. The safe assumption is that Callen is the spammer behind this activity.The scary part however, I observed Callen getting traction.The rate at which this tweet was showing up was increasing over the remainder of the hour, fueled by fake accounts, while more and more real Twitterati started picking up on the ReTweet action.What did Callen’s account say during this attack? “Welcome new Tweeters!”

I hesitated before exposing this tactic for fear of spawning new spammers but there it is. If you believe in generating real social capital, having a strong reputation then please be a decent human being and don’t spam people with a ton of fake or ghost Twitter accounts.The unfortunate part is, I know this plea will fall on more than a few deaf ears.  So I call on all Twitter users who read this to expose these fraudulent activities at the very least by using the hashtag #spammer.

“If only fail-whales could be controlled to solely affect spammers while leaving the rest of us alone…if only.”