Spammers are abusing Twitter. And I don’t mean folk that constantly pimp their content or abuse the RT function on Tweetdeck.
No these are old fashioned spammers: debt advisors, purveyors of dodgy pills and porn merchants, to name but a few. They find you through keyword searches based on the content of your Tweets and follow you in the hope that you’ll check out their profile, website link and maybe even follow them back.
I spotted the trend after writing a couple of blog posts about the equity market and social lending.
You could of course make your Tweet-stream permission based or simply block dodgy followers. But how about turning the situation into a pub game?
The objective is to attract Twitter followers faster than your opponent by baiting Tweet spammer with alluring messages. The only rule is that you can only Tweet a bait every 15 minutes. Its geeky, no doubt, but a lot of fun. My record is 14 dodgy followers in an hour.
Twitter is a perfect network in so much as its possible to remove all the noise you’d normally receive in a social network and focus only on the messages from the people that you want to receive. Spammers have not role within that network. But there’s an easy solution – block them or have a bit of fun.
So I Tweet ‘Can’t get any erection, who can help me?’ and wait to see who touts the wares?
Er yes Steve…exactly that. Although be prepared for every ex girlfriend to “join the conversation”
I don’t get it – well, I get the game but I don’t get the spammers. Seriously, someone follows me, I almost never look at their profile. If I look at the profile I almost never follow them back unless something about their updates seems staggeringly relevant. How many people seriously click on a website link in the bio of a Twitter follower they don’t know? Genuinely curious even if the answer is: everyone does it Sally, except you, because you’re completely self-involved.
Genius Steve. I might try ‘Worrying about my mortgage repayments and poker debts has given me erection problems, even XXX pics of Britney Spears won’t help’…might set up a new account first.
How about “I have a safe bank account for the honourable transfer monies for deposit”