Comments on: Twitter Suspending Re-follows – Is Your Account in Danger?

By: eliz obih frank

eliz obih frank — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:48:05 +0000

As a relative newbie to Twitter, I find the practice of follow/unfollow rather bizarre. Initially, I thought the behavior was juvenile because I had assumed a few people f/unf me based on my tweets or comments on hot topics; unfortunately, the practise as shared above is quite insidious!
I tweet a lot, enjoy interacting and exchanging information with others, and I’m loyal to followers. I was baffled in the beginning with the fair sized daily shifts in followers and couldn’t figure it out until others started complaining about it in their tweets. Spamming for numbers? It makes no sense to sully the social aspect of Twitter by turning it into a mind/head/numbers game….
Recently, I decided to manage my home page better and things have improved with Tweetlater. Yes, I now autofollow/unfollow and do a manual check to see if any of the usual suspects are re-following me. Will this change the practise? Probably not; especially if we factor in Twitter glitches or the actions of Tweeters who are easily bored/annoyed.
Now that I have read this piece I will be vigilant and simply follow the suggestions above to block/report such abusers.
I guess what some of these folk are forgetting is that building rapport is equally important to making the sale; especially if you want lifelong customers.
Cheers!

By: 8chocolate

8chocolate — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:35:28 +0000

@Chris Lockwood I like to know who’s following me. I check out their site and if their content or views are interesting or relevant to me in my life or work, I follow them. Many I would never have found had they not followed me in the first place so I do like the notifications.

I think the biggest problem is people want to have lots of followers to feel popular so they feel they need to follow anyone that follows them. I’d like to think I’ve left high school (hopefully) behind.

By: Gerald Weber

Gerald Weber — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:22:51 +0000

It is annoying when someone constantly keeps following you and you get notification after notification that they are following you.

By: Oli

Oli — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:27:45 +0000

Really interesting – I don’t do automated following but was considering it, now I’ll think twice…

By: Chris Lockwood

Chris Lockwood — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 06:10:55 +0000

Here is my sugggestion: turn off those notifications entirely and don’t worry about stuff like this. I don’t need an email every time someone follows me or unfollows me- that just clogs my inbox and wastes my time deleting notices.

People can follow or unfollow as they wish- I see no reason to act like tattletales or vigilantes on Twitter.

By: Karen Aguilar

Karen Aguilar — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:19:16 +0000

Yes spammers are everywhere – why should this be different? As soon as I get a spam, I notify @spam and the problem is solved. You may want to follow them.

By: LoneWolf

LoneWolf — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:48:20 +0000

Hi Internet Marketing Sales. Actually, I do see where you are going with your comments on spam, but my contention is that what you are seeing here in this thread (with the exception of Anonymous as you described) is not spam. The links back to your web site and twitter id are part of our identity and we are encouraged to leave them when we share our thoughts on one another’s blogs. It is a trade of value for value — comments for links and exposure.

That isn’t to say that there is never spam in blog comments. I see more automated spam in my blogs than live comments — thanks Askimet for keeping most of it out. I’ve also seen a comment that was borderline but the person made an effort to comment on my post before adding a link to his own site.

I guess that what I’m trying to say is that while the spammers and bloggers who comment on other sites are trying to achieve the same result, that doesn’t make comments like yours and mine spam.

I also agree with you on the RT without looking. I actually saw someone tweet last week that they were glad that they could always RT certain people without having to check out the links!

One problem that I have is that due to slow internet connection I will usually click on the link and keep reading tweets while the pages load. Then, by the time I get around to reading the page the tweet has scrolled out of view and I usually forget who tweeted in in the first place. I find self-contained tweets easier to RT since I can see the value of the tweet immediately. I think I’m starting to ramble a little off topic here 8=) Time to get some shut eye.

By: Holly Powell

Holly Powell — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:01:27 +0000

Thanks for sharing this post. I am really overwhelmed with the comments posted in here. Good thing that Twitter has taken actions to this game. All will ok in time i think..

By: Internet Marketing Sales

Internet Marketing Sales — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:28:34 +0000

Hi LoneWolf,
I think I may not of conveyed the humor I see so you, or others, can understand it. Yes, we are encouraged to provide our names and Twitter id so we are not like post #32 – Anonymous (most likely waiting for approval). What I find funny is that we are talking about spam (and not the lunch meat developed during WWII) and that almost everyone here knows how to turn their name into a link, and that could be considered spamming the search engines.

Spam is unsolicited, often inappropriate and usually automated.
I don’t think I could of said it any better, and I do agree with it. ReTweets could even be considered spam if someone just RTs a tweet without looking at it, just forwarding it on to their followers.

I hope you understand better the humor I see in this tread. It isn’t the spamming of people on twitter that I find funny, it is how we all know to get our names to show up as links. I don’t think spamming should be allow, even in emails. Lets charge spammers (twitter, email, etc) $5 per person a spammy message is delivered to, and share it with the receptionist and the networks it travels over.

By: Seth Goldstein

Seth Goldstein — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:29:23 +0000

Great article. It will be interesting to see how Twitter addresses spammers in the future if they take a pre or a post approach to dealing with it. Captha being the the pre approach and suspending accounts being the post.