What is Twitter “Follow Spam”?
Yo subscribe to WebRampage via RSS feeds or email. That way you'll get all the updates and everything.
People have been talking about this thing called Twitter “follow spam“. So, what is this thing? And are we defining it correctly? Today I’ll talk a bit about it.
Follow spam is the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you’re actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back.
That’s what the people at Twitter wrote on their blog. Well that explains what “follow spam” is. You just follow tons of people, so that they add you back and/or click on the link on your profile. Now I would agree that this is pretty annoying. But, not everyone is trying to “spam”.
On rare occasions we may see a person who is mass following and actually cares about every tweet.
See Twitter is also saying that. Yesterday, an old lady was bitching at me and was accusing me of spamming Twitter. Hmm how so? She said that I added a “zillion” people on Twitter, so that they click the link on my profile.
Okay I’m actually interested in people’s tweets. I reply to a lot of them and have like a small conversation. I agree that I added a bunch of people on Twitter. But, that wasn’t “follow spam”. Now of course, I wanted them to follow me back. What’s the point of tweeting if only a few people are following you?
Did I add random people? No. I added people who were interested in tech & web. Most of the people I added were TechCrunch’s followers. Did I start spamming them with links to my site? No. I made like 2 or 3 tweets about my sites. 2 or 3 out of 171 tweets? Is that really spamming (or huge self-promotion)?
Is Obama spamming Twitter? He is following 64K people and he’s got about 61K followers. I’m not sure how he managed to add 64K people, but I don’t think he wants to spam. He just wants to keep more people updated.
I don’t agree with the current definition of follow spam. It should be when you follow thousands of people (who you’re not interested in) and want them to follow you back. And you spam them with your links! Maybe this would define follow spam a bit better.
I know that there are lots of spammers on Twitter. I mean the REAL spammers. But, not everyone is a spammer! So, What do you think? Do you think my way to define it is better? And what about popular bloggers who keep posting links to every single one of their posts? What about Obama?
21 August 2008 at 10:06 pm
Yes I feel that alot of people follow me so that I will follow them in return and then they do seems to spam but I do think I like your definition better. They can’t says just because someone if following alot of people that their intention is to spam.
[Reply]
21 August 2008 at 10:09 pm
@Gerald Weber: Thank you, sir. I agree with you and I think that it would be rude if you didn’t follow back some of your interesting followers. Its just being nice and friendly.
[Reply]
22 August 2008 at 4:50 pm
Well, the great thing about Twitter is that you choose who you “follow”, and others choose whether or not to follow you. That’s the spam-combating beauty of it.
Isn’t that a little bit immature?
[Reply]
22 August 2008 at 4:52 pm
@Josh: Yeah I guess, but she really is a bit. You should have seen the things she blogs about.
[Reply]
22 August 2008 at 4:53 pm
Sorry for the double-post, but why do my
blockquotes turn into normal paragraphs? Grrrr, it’s irritating.[Reply]
22 August 2008 at 5:02 pm
@th13rteen: You don’t even know for sure that that’s her blog. Your guess is based on the e-mail address, which was given in the confidence that it will not be shared. The information which she chose to reveal to the general public does certainly not reveal her identity, and effectively you’ve breached the promise in the brackets by the comments form, a Google-like act.
[Reply]
22 August 2008 at 5:37 pm
@Josh: Okay I removed that part. I was a bit pissed off at her when I wrote this post. She had been bugging me for 2 days. Oh well.
Actually admins can see the email. Its a function of WordPress. I thought people should know who she is. Well I’ll admit that maybe linking to her Twitter profile wasn’t the right thing to do. Sorry about that.
I’ll remove the links. Thanks for pointing this out, Josh. I really do appreciate it. Again we’re not all perfect and we do make mistakes. But, the important part is that we learn from it.
[Reply]
22 August 2008 at 6:09 pm
@Josh: Yeah I noticed that too. Maybe a problem with the theme or with WordPress. I’m not sure. I’ll take a look into it.
[Reply]
5 September 2008 at 7:35 pm
[...] is he actually “follow spamming“? I personally wouldn’t say that. Maybe it technically falls under follow spam, but he [...]