Twitter

How To Fight Twitter Spam

Twitter spam is officially a thing. Today I was followed on Twitter by “signupnow” which links to bux.to, a site that promotes getting paid to look at ads. This is the second bogus follower I received in a week.

According to the follower’s website, “At Bux.to, you get paid to click on ads and visit websites. The process is easy! You simply click a link and view a website for 30 seconds to earn money.”

I don’t know anything about the site, but it smell funny to me and I’d stay away from it unless you can confirm if they are legit. My guess is NO.

This is the start of Twitter spam and it’s a sign that Twitter is coming of age. Age more people use it and people learn to exploit it, Twitter will see more and more spam followings.

Signupnow already is following over 2,000 people and if all of them click through to see what it’s about then that’s a good bit of traffic generated. The conversion rate is another story, but for now my guess is it’s an effective way to get attention.

One blog I read said this about the problem.

“I haven’t seen an issue with this yet, but as we shift from primarily early adopters to more and more mainstreaming, I expect it will happen. Especially since Google is ranking tweets and twitterers quite well- the black hat SEO people will soon notice and try to exploit” – Brian Carter

For now the best way to combat Twitter spam is to remove the bogus Twitter followers to minimize their reach. But a long term defense will have to come from the developers at Twitter. They will have to implement a solution that requires you to approve followers before they can show up in your list, or they will have to implement a timed follow limit that will prevent people from following more than five people in a twenty minute period. That way it would be a pain for would be Twitter spammers to follow people by the thousands.

How would you fight Twitter spam?

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com