If you spend any time on twitter you've probably noticed that there's a lot of twitter spam these days. If you haven't noticed - Wake Up! It's there! I wanted to share a few things that I look for in order to determine whether or not a twitter user may be a spammer.
Last week, I wrote a post entitled "You're Only As Good As Your Last Tweet" which highlighted some changes that have been made to the twitter user interface to make it easier to know more about twitter users at a glance.
Now when glancing, here's a few things to look out for. The first thing I look at is the users name. If the user is a spammer, there's usually some dead giveaways...like letters grouped together to make psudo-words, orr names that are too weird to be names, or names followed by a series of numbers. As if the creator of the account was making multiple versions of the same account.
The other thing to look for is contradictions between the Account Name (the one in large blue type at the top) and the user name (the one immediately below the account name and right before the location). Please see the SPAM #3 example below, where I highlighted all of the Account Names and User Names for you to compare. For instance if my name is Jason Sanders, but my Account Name says Sandra_McHotty...you can bet I'm a spammer. Once you start paying attention to the names, you will start to notice the same user names over and over and over. If you've never thought to look for this, scan your follower list and you just might find a lot of Johngoogle's and ToomerJean's and Jamessunny's and MansonCharles's and I'm sure there are tons of others. You'll also notice that these spammers often use the same Avatar Pictures for their Spammy accounts.
Another giveaway is the content that the twitter user is posting. Spammers often use technology to update their spam to their multiple twitter accounts simultaneously. As I showed in my article last week, you can now see every twitter user's last tweet. If you're seeing the same tweet over and over, it's a spam account, as seen in the SPAM #1 and SPAM #2 examples in the photo above. Some Twitter spammers are a bit more advanced and try to use tweet scheduling services to doll out their spam, but a trained eye can also pick up on those patterns. Notice in the picture above the repetitive occurrence of people tweeting about yoga. Often a spammer will pay attention to trending topics and try to hide their spam links in a message about a popular topic, i.e: Michael Jackson, or Iran Election.
Someone will inevitably ask, "Is it wrong for someone to have multiple twitter accounts. If they're using them all is it really spam. The answer is yes, it can be. The rules are hard to define in a clear cut way, and Twitter obviously goes out of it's way to use common sense when evaluating these issues, but here is their take on the topic.
So if you spot a spammer on Twitter what are you to do? Twitter encourages all it's user to report spam. You do that by addressing your tweet to @Spam followed by the user name of the @OffendingParty. You can also include in your message what the @OffendingParty was doing to constitute spam (name squatting, unsolicited Direct Message marketing, etc).
I'm normally not one who looks for opportunities to throw people under the bus, but recently I've started reporting every instance of spam that I see. It has become so prevalent that it's important for people who value and care about the Twitter platform to be vigilant in keeping it free from this obnoxious behavior...so don't be afraid to report spam.
A word of warning, never RT (ReTweet) a message to @Spam, you may accidentally get the legitimate user who originally reported the spam or even your own account suspended along with the spam.
Jason Sanders @ValuePagesGroup
Business Networking Specialist
Comments(5)