Fighting Spam on Twitter, Any Easy Way Out?
Twitter is a wonderful site for sharing details, product offerings, status updates and what-not for a business. As an evolving medium for furthering Social Media engagement, Twitter has come of age in the past 2 years. However, with its success and gigantic popularity, it was obvious that covert spammers will eventually re-define their Twitter strategies to promote spam.
And this is exactly that is causing a heartbreak to the business users, who would like to use their business Twitter accounts for nothing else, but pure business theme. In talking to one of the business’s Twitter marketing expert, it became clear that she hated all the direct messages sent to her with all sorts of offers for reciprocal following, and special offers that could make anyone’s day. Covert spam also surfaced in the form of link outs to dubious sites through tweets that talk of some of the most happening news stories for the day. Clearly, spammers do employ the news stories to actually disguise and send out link-outs to their spam ridden sites.
While Twitter spam is being dealt with very effectively by Twitter in terms of isolating automated activities that happen on specific accounts, it is clear that while the Twitter algorithm takes care of spam bombs that have the potential to decapitate the entire site, there are problems on the ground that come from manual spam that arises from manual activity happening through specific Twitter accounts. We are correct to assume that such tweets originate from those accounts that have little or scant regard for Twitter etiquettes or business etiquettes.
Most spam will originate in the form of the direct messages. While we cannot expect Twitter to make macro-level changes in its algorithm to prevent spam-laced direct messages, it is clear that there are third-party software programmes that are designed to make direct message spam a lesser evil. These software site between you and the Twitter site and if the direct message qualifies as a spam message based on pre-existing criteria such as sending Twitter account history, content within the tweet, links within the tweet, then such direct messages are automatically routed to a spam box wherein you could go through them at a preferred time rather than hitting it the first thing in the morning.
Besides making use of external software that acts like your interface with Twitter, you would do well to take some time and report all the spam to Twitter using @spam. The Twitter spam team is overtly active when it comes to taking proactive measures in checking spam flowing through the site.
Essentially, we are at a nascent stage when it comes to creating and managing an active Twitter spam countering strategy. For now, it is a pain that you will have to live with, or try and embrace a utility that lessens the pain for your business’s Twitter account.
This guest post is written by Rob Smith, a professional SEO and SM writer. Rob is also associated with the vehicle tracking company and is responsible for analyzing the fleet tracking methodologies across the different industry verticals.
Now that I think about it I haven’t gotten any spam in like a month, and before that I was getting at least one spam message a day. Twitter is doing something right.
It’s good news that Twitter have found a much easy way to prevent spam and discontinue any existing spam processes within Twitter. Great information here. Thanks!