101 Articles Automated Twitter Accounts or Twitter Spam
AUTOMATED TWITTER ACCOUNTS OR TWITTER SPAM
Over the last couple of years or so, social networking has become a revelation amidst millions of web users. It brings in people closer from different nations, share their views, chat with friends, share photos and notes, post videos, update status, scribble on walls and scrapbooks, comment or post your views, video conferencing, advertise events, wish people and send them gifts on their birthdays etc. It all started with Orkut introduced by Google and then Mark Zuckerberg came up with the Facebook and now you have Twitter. Of course in between these famous social networking sites, you also had other social networking sites such as LinkedIn, MySpace, Tagged, Google+, Bebo etc. It was a wonderful concept originally when it was introduced as people who went abroad on pursuit of their careers where able to stay in touch with their friends and family via these social networking sites.
Soon, companies and other business organizations started making use of these social networking sites for both personal as well as business purposes. For example, these companies have their own profiles or pages in Facebook where people become members when they click the like button. This allowed companies to advertise their products or events that they were likely to host. In general it was also like forums where people could post their views and opinions or gather particular information about the organization. Thus these social networking sites served as a platform to bring in people together for both personal as well as business reasons. It was a wonderful marketing strategy for many organizations to boost their business and undergo development allowing them to reach out for more customers.
Automated Twitter Accounts or Twitter Spam:
Although twitter is a wonderful concept that allows millions of web surfers to tweet, it has also been used as a platform by spammers and hackers to manipulate search engines, web users and genuine website owners as well as SEO firms. By doing so, they derive more traffic to their websites and develops their own business in an unfair way.
Twitter feed is opt-in by nature. People have the option to follow you which allows them to see your updates. If you subscribe a particular person or choose to follow him/her, every time they tweet, you'll get a notification and you can view their tweet messages or statuses. But before you choose to follow someone or some page, are you really sure what you are getting into? Twitter does allow people to create personal accounts and corporate accounts as well. As an expert, I have come across companies having corporate accounts in twitter and the profile looks like a personal profile. This misleads millions of other twitter members who think that you are a person and subscribe to you. And thus these companies which project themselves in a faking manner are doing a great disservice to their brand while not even having the proper time for personalizing their link shilling. This alone will brand you as an annoyance by taking up someone's entire twitter feed and you certainly don't want that.
Twitter can act both as a social networking site as well as a marketing base for several companies. As long as what you post as a tweet is worth the content and it can serve very useful to millions of twitter users it is fine. But the automated twitter posts are really annoying and arrogant in the sense that half the time what they post to promote their brands or develop backlinks doesn't really make sense for people who get unnecessary notifications every now and then. People who fall into the trap end up contributing to their website's traffic and end up in a website that doesn't give them the necessary information they seek for. The arrogance part of it arises with their though they can almost throw anything on web surfers faces and expect them to read through it and waste their time.
It is quite disheartening to think that these organizations and spam website owners dont really respect their followers.
The new software called as Tweet Tornado allows people to generate any number of twitter accounts, interlink them (follow), and point them back to someone's website. This is the whole idea behind generating backlinks for a particular website irrespective of whether they deserve it or not.
Spammers and hackers make use of this software to generate millions of twitter accounts and interlink them and deriving artificial traffic to their websites, manipulating search engines, amalgamating result sets pertaining to different keywords or search phrases and destroying the sole purpose of search engines creating hindrance and annoyance to millions of web surfers. |
These automated posts or tweets contain messages that don't make any sense as well. They are nothing but a random set of keywords spammed together to increase their websites ranking. Most times they post several threads or tweets containing backlinks to their websites. Backlinks and keywords play a very significant role when it comes to ranking a website. And thus these spammers work towards their website with a focus on blackhat SEO techniques.
The Tweet Tornado is comparing their services with Google Adwords, MSN Live search etc for advertising purposes. This certainly implies that they are offering the software as a way to derive traffic to one's website. Twitter is a relatively closed system made up of unique communities of interests. And these corporate profiles or automated profiles amalgamates its purpose as well provide hardly any information to the communities that has subscribed to them.
Twitter is all about engagement. Having several twitter accounts posting spam messages containing backlinks isn't really enough. It is the engagement factor that makes twitter work and separates itself from blogs and forums. One needs to lure the communities of different unique interests and create that engagement for their profiles. Blogs and forums are relatively an open system.
The marketing idea implemented by twitter relies upon the social networking concept, the connections to quality friends who would back you and develop your reputation and brand.
If such software is being employed to create different automated accounts and link amongst them to derive traffic, no one else that are genuine is going to back you. This is certainly not the way to market your brand. It might be good enough to influence search engine and boost your website's rankings, but you are really losing your face and reputation amidst communities.
And this enrages them by large and they will retaliate at some point of time and you will be identified and prosecuted.
A common example under this circumstance would be the incident where people gaming the Amazon's review system took a lot of heat when their mistakes got exposed and people revolted. Why shouldn't it be the same in the case of twitter?
To summarize, spammers and hackers make use of such software's to generate millions of social networking accounts to derive traffic and backlinks to their websites. Backlinks play a crucial role when it comes deciding the fate of a website and the ranking algorithms are mere programs which just takes the quantity in to account instead of the quality whether these backlinks provide the real picture or not. And thus the websites get a very good ranking and they dominate search engine result sets pertaining to several different search phrases. As a result the sole purposes of the search engines are defeated and it provides an inefficient amalgamated result sets to its web surfers adding to their agony and annoyance. Several genuine websites and web developing firms and other SEO firms also lose the opportunity to be listed among the result sets and develop their business in a fair way.
Ethically speaking this is wrong. It is a blackhat SEO technique. It is also not good in the marketing sense as it will bring a bad name and reputation to your brand amidst the communities though your victory over search engines might be prominent, but lasting short as such practices could be identified and you will be brought to justice and light.
Twitter is about communities, not numbers. It is about engagement and communication, not dead end accounts that interlink. It is not about manipulating search engines, it is about the communities who are your lightly targets to become your customers. Remember this and use your opportunity to your advantage and in the best possible way to develop your business in an ethical manner of course.
How to identify automated twitter accounts?
If you are able to find a twitter account with 50,000 followers, but has posted only about 300 tweets, it is certainly an automated profile. They make use of special software's such as Tweet Tornado, Tweet Adder etc to generate so many followers and interlink them (follow), just to show such huge numbers and mislead genuine members. Mass adding people is considered as unethical and it is quite prominent and easily identifiable. Automated twitter accounts are nothing but an annoyance like an answering machine. The concept behind them is fine when they serve a particular purpose and are used ethically.
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Screen Shots |
Comment spamming in twitter
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Graph |
The following graph shows the percentage of spam tweets per day from February 2009 to February 2010. It has been noted that the percentage has shown a consistent increase till August 2009 after which the percent has started to decline.
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Working Examples |
The screenshot below refers to one of the most popular fake buzz tweet of 2 bomb explosions in White House
Examples of Automated twitter account creator:
Other examples of twitter spam
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |