10 Reasons: Twitter has become a spam broadcast channel
Twitter started out and used to be a personal communications channel about what you are doing.
The goal was to inform your friends and followers, who on their turn would join in the conversation.
Since the event of the increase of popularity thanks to the million followers contest and Oprah showing the use of Twitter to millions on her show the type of Twitter users has changed significantly:
From geeks and early adopters to “Joe Average / The Plumber”.
This is the result of being the most hyped social media and platform during 2008 to 2009.
People started using Twitter as the mass media had told them to do so.
However after the first use or after a while, people don’t see any benefit or get into a communication, thus most of them forgot about it: no action or Tweets.
They add no content. There are no conversations.
Most people on Twitter are just like sheep: they do follow but they don’t Tweet at all:
- Over 80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers.
- 30 percent have zero followers.
They are like sheep following the mass media leaders on the Internet and TV.
Wondering if the sheep actually read any of the Twitter messages?
The Twitterers
Hardly anyone sends out any Tweets: only a minority group of people actually Tweet.
In case people do Tweet, they mainly Re-Tweet the 140 char messages of somebody else.
The problem is probably due to the fact:
- Most people don’t have so much interesting to say.
- Most people don’t do so many interesting things during the day.
- Writing an interesting 140 character sentence is harder than you think.
Actually when we do something interesting, the last thing we would think about is sending out Tweets. The trill is not in the Tweets but in the action.
Twitter or RSS reader?
About 10 years ago RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was developed and introduced for the same purpose with the only difference of the requirement of the RSS reader:
- Messages are streamed to you without any effort
- Subscribing to an RSS feed or following a Twitterer is similar.
Thus it seems Twitter has ended up as a novel form of an RSS information service with less technical complexity.
The Twitterers: Leaders and Spammers
The leaders of the gang use Twitter frequently during the day and shout about everything that could interest anybody combined with (shameless) self promotion. (LEADSExplorer is ranked 106.967th on Twitterholic)
On the other hand of the minority group that sends creates and posts messages on Twitter there are a large number of people communicating advertising messages.
More and more Tweets have become messages like publicity for all kinds of services, goods, websites and blogs – or spam. This is due to the fact a large part of the population is on Twitter and it has been hyped by the media extensively.
These spammers use bots to send out spam messages at a high rate every day.
Hence Twitter has become a broadcast system for spammers.
The 10 reasons for spam on Twitter:
1. Reaching a large population of people is on Twitter – mainly in the USA.
2. Sending messages can be automated.
3. No costs or membership involved.
4. Multiple accounts possible.
5. Duplicate messages allowed.
6. No spam filtering like with email: no firewalls.
7. The short message makes the advertising statement stronger.
8. The short message can get a higher interest from the reader.
9. (Short) link system available without preview (TinyURL – Bit.ly – …)
10. Picture avatars using good looking women/men attracting more followers.
Bonus: The profile provides a link to website: will get indexed by search engines.
How do Twitter spammers work?
1) They follow you in the hope you start following them.
2) They Re-Tweet breaking news in the hope you start following them.
Then they start spamming using Tweets that are apparently interesting but link to a squeeze page like this one.
In the end many of the Leading Twitterers are spamming too, but with more style and don’t use a squeeze page.
Are you a sheep or are you a spam wolf looking for sheep?
Are you using Twitter to spam?
More from LEADS Explorer
- The world has become a village thanks to Twitter – News power change
- Should all web pages become Twitter like message pages?
- Beta has become marketing
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