Twitter Spam!

Today I was more active than I had ever been on Twitter. In particular, I got into a tweet-a-tweet with a friend about SEO, paid search and earned media. Next thing I knew, I had many more people following my account, strangers following my account. But why?

At first I thought it was because these strangers were interested in connecting with others interested in SEO and paid search. But then Reddy started to follow me.

To step back, when someone decides to follow you, it basically means that your updates appear on their screen when they login to Twitter. More importantly, an email alert gets sent to me every time someone decides to follow me. The email lets me know that someone is "following me" and provides a link back to that user's profile.

When Reddy started to follow me, I received the email from Twitter and as with the others I received, I clicked their profile link to check if they were somehow connected to me through a friend or colleague. When I arrived, I noticed that Reddy had one post only and it was a post touting a piece of search engine marketing software that I just had to have.

I then recalled that almost all my other new followers/strangers also were touting some deal or product that I needed. I did not catch it earlier because the other followers had many different posts of which many were "normal"; in other words, they appeared to be like other Twitter accounts that my friends would keep (except for the offers which I did not catch early on).

So Reddy, not being a savvy Twitter Spammer or maybe just being new to the game got me to his page, but forgot the rule of subtlety. By creating just one tweet, the jig was up and there was no chance that I would click on the offer or even worse, click to actually follow "Reddy" and receive his offers in my account on an ongoing basis.

How it works? I dont know, but I expect that Reddy has written some code to search for certain keywords in the Twitter feed and then automatically follow anyone who types in a keyword that Reddy targeted. From there, Twitter actually takes care of the rest...