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10 Signs for Spotting Twitter Spammers

I’ve been seeing a lot of Twitter spammers lately, andI’ve learned how to spot most of them rather quickly. Aside from the people who blatantly tell us we can make money, build traffic, or try Forex trading (I still don’t know what that is; don’t care either), there are a few tricks people are using to get you to follow them.

They’re trying to make their Twitter accounts look like real ones so you’ll follow them. Then they’ll either change their Twitter handle to something more spammy, or they’ll just DM you their crap, hoping you’ll fall for it.

    1. Following over 1,000 people, but doesn’t have an avatar. Someone who has managed to gather enough followers should know enough to get an avatar. No avatar is not a sign they’re spammers, just like a real photo is a sign they’re not. But when I see a new follower with no bio and no avatar, I may block them, I may not.
    2. They’re following over 1,000 people but have never, ever tweeted. Sometimes someone can write a decent bio, and post a photo, but have not sent a single tweet.
What
  1. The bio is formulaic.The one I’m seeing the most lately lists their likes, where they used to live, and another place they used to live.Likes – Writing, Tunes, Photography, Movies. Gym, Formerly from Albany , various places near Columbus.
  2. Their avatar photo has ugly borders. The ones I’ve been seeing are photos that look to be about 15 – 20years old (they’re actually a little faded; nice touch.), and have borders on the top and bottom, or left and right. The colors are purples, greens, and blues that remind me of something you would have worn in the 80s. Basically, the photos were too small, so the spammer added some border colors to fill up the photo space.
  3. Avatar is of a young attractive woman but has a guy’s name. And not even the sort-of gender neutral names like Tony/Toni or Stevie. No, these are names like Barry, David, or Kevin. I’ve only seen this once in a while, but it still happens from time to time.
  4. Avatar is of a young, scantily-clad woman. Guys, I’m sorry, but not only is she not really into you, it’s probably not even a woman on the other end of that Twitter account. Most women will not post a photo of themselves like that on Twitter, especially if they want to show you how to make money through your Twitter account.
  5. They have tweets on their profile page, but they’re usually gibberish. Things like “Ian successfully dispelled” or “it isn’t sepulchral quiet.” I’ll block them on both Twitter.com and on TweetDeck. It doesn’t actually count as double-block to Twitter, but I feel better doing it. (Update: @KaryD and @JenKaneCo apparently call this Twitter Haiku. I’m adopting this moniker too. Thanks you two.)
  6. Their Twitter handle contains numbers. Not just a couple numbers, like the year they were born. These look like tracking numbers. Once you start seeing several of these people following you, they invariably follow the same patterns: they’re all young women, they’re often accompanied by a formulaic bio or no bio at all, and their tweets are often commercial or nonsensical. Sheila9489, Kelly1276
  7. Their Twitter handle is NAME_in_CITY. I’ll see Lisa_in_Milkwaukee and Stephanie_in_Madison. I got hit by this spammer when he started in Portland, Maine, and he predictably traveled westward over the next several months. I couldn’t even give him points for creativity, although I do confess to a little thrill of recognition when he chose a few Indiana cities I knew.
  8. Their Twitter handle follows similar formulas, like CITY_OMG or CITY_140. Handles like Omaha_OMG or Louisville_140 were also common. I still see follow requests from this guy once in a while.
  9. Unfortunately, Twitter hasn’t been able to crack down on these spammers, or they’re not as worried about it. But I think they should be able to identify some of these strategies (or even maybe hundreds of accounts all signing up from the same IP address) and work to stop these slimeballs from clogging up their Twitter tubes.

    How are you spotting spammers? Any hints? How do you deal with them or eliminate them? I’m working on a new post about how to deal with the people who clog my Twitter, and I would love your suggestions.

    My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

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Social Media is Older Than You Think It Is. Much Older.

Social media is not as new as people think it is.

It’s not even as new as the new date you just thought of after you saw that last sentence.

Social media, or at least its very beginnings, is almost as old as I am. (Give or take 10 years.)

The very first place for people to communicate online was on the bulletin board systems (BBSes), which were created in the late 1970s, and allowed people to dial in on their 300 baud modems. They were usually only for the hobbyists and geeks who wanted to talk about things that interested them, usually computers. Since long-distance charges applied for out-of-town groups, most users were from their particular city. And user gatherings (this was before we called them “meetups”) were a regular event, where people had the chance to meet those they had been chatting with online the night before.

In 1980, the Usenet — a collection of BBS-type discussion groups — was created and used widely in academia. There, people could visit a group, post articles and messages, and other people would reply to them. While Usenet was originally started to be discussion groups for researchers and computer users, people started creating groups for their other interests. Back in 1990, I joined a soccer discussion group on Usenet, and had “friends” from England, Scotland, Australia, Italy, and Germany. We would discuss our favorite soccer teams, and the 1990 World Cup, which had just finished before I joined. There were groups for political viewpoints, philosophical thought, favorite TV shows, and various sports. I connected with people from all around the world, but especially in the US.

"You've got mail!"

Four years later, I took the plunge and joined AOL, downloading the first software in 90 minutes over my wicked fast 14.4K modem. (I had to choose between it, Compuserve, Prodigy, eWorld, and a host of other online communities.) AOL was the first major attempt at offering an online community to people outside the university setting. This was like Usenet on steroids, because there was a more graphical interface to AOL, and it looked nice. There were also more consumer groups, geared toward those non-computer users. I belonged to groups for writers, home brew makers, cooks, and fans of Celtic music. Since AOL had local and long distance access numbers, our friends were from out of town, and meetups were unlikely (and frequently warned against).

A lot of people outgrew AOL, once they learned they could explore outside the walled community with a web browser and an Internet Service Provider. We consumed the web for information, we emailed each other funny websites we found, and we shared graphics by breaking up ASCII files and emailing them, reassembling them in word processor file, and then converting them with a text-to-graphic converter. But we didn’t have community, unless we returned to AOL or joined an email listserv.

It wasn’t until groups like Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook took advantage of the Internet’s increasing speed and the web browsers that did all that assembling and converting for us, making it easier to connect with our friends, and even telling us where they lived. Twitter boiled communication down to its barest essence, letting us share information in text-sized bits. And LinkedIn played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with our professional networks, letting us see who we were connected to, and how far we were from each other.

The point is this: social media is older than Facebook (2004). Way older. To truly understand the history — and age — of social media, you need to talk to the computer geeks who were online in the late 1970s and early 1980s, participating in the different BBSes and Usenet groups that dotted the online landscape.

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Four Ways to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool

Have you gotten any sales leads from Twitter? Have you ever found any opportunities, whether personally or professionally, from the micro-blogging network?

While some of the social media purists might still gnash their teeth and pound their laptops from the safety of their moms’ basements, anyone who wants to see Twitter (and other social media tools) succeed needs to show their bosses that it can generate business. If you’re in sales or marketing, here are four ways you can use Twitter as a lead generation tool.

1) Connect With People in Your Industry.

Twitter is a great way to easily get connected with people in your industry. Use tools like Twellow (for Twitter Yellow Pages) to find people in your industry, and search.twitter.com to find people talking about your industry keywords. Also try Googling a title and/or company with the words “on Twitter” in the search. So, look for VP of Creative Services on Twitter or Professional Blog Service on Twitter, and see what pops up.

If you’re a TweetDeck user or use Twitter lists, save your industry contacts into their own list, and communicate with them. By keeping them in their own list, you’re more easily able to see what they’re talking about.

2) Build Relationships.

The newbie mistake that many new Twitter marketers use is to treat Twitter like an advertising channel. That is one thing you absolutely cannot do. People don’t want you to sell to them.

Instead, establish relationships. Have conversations with them, retweet them, introduce people, share articles, ask them questions. If they’re local people, or you have a chance to attend industry conferences, connect with them in person. Meet for lunch or coffee, and create that all-important offline relationship. Then, you’re a person, not a handle. You have a face, not an avatar. By creating those relationships, you become someone they’ll trust, especially if they ever need what it is that you do.

But never, ever try to sell anything. Do that in phone calls and meetings, when the time is right, not when they start following you.

3) Establish Your Expertise.

When people have a problem, make sure they know you’re the one to solve it. Answer questions, share information, refer useful articles to them. If you write a blog (you do write a blog, don’t you?), share the useful posts with them. Ask them to comment, and leave thoughtful comments on their blog.

If you’re trying to reach people in your industry, write about topics related to that industry, especially if you can make them useful to the problems your Twitter network is having. For example, if you own a Mac repair shop, and you know a bunch of Mac-owning public speakers, and you know a lot of them are having problems dealing with the new Keynote 09 (which, irritatingly, ruined a bunch of my past slide decks. Thank God for backups), you could write a couple blog posts about how to solve that problem.

Then, forward the article on to them via Twitter or DM. They’ll see that you know your stuff (as well as theirs), and they’re more likely to call you for that problem that can’t be fixed with a few keystrokes, or explosive cursing and an external hard drive.

4) Direct or Facilitate the Conversation.

If you create the subject people are talking about, or steer people to the place where they can find answers, you are helping people figure out they may need your product or service in the first place.

The best example I can give is Apple computers. Before 2001, no one knew they needed a portable MP3 player. No one knew they needed a way to play music on anything besides a portable CD player. No one knew they needed a way to create or listen to podcasts, or that they could even learn through radio shows of random length and scheduling. Once Apple introduced the iPod, people realized they needed this device, and the industry changed.

By directing or facilitating the conversation, you can help people see the pain point they never knew they had, and they will look to you for solutions.

How do you use Twitter as a lead generation tool? Do you even do that, or do you think it’s just wrong and that people shouldn’t do it? Leave a comment, and let us hear from you.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

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New Twitter Tool, Twylah, Promises Huge Things for Social Media

Last Friday I tweeted: “I’m easily impressed. I’m not easily flabbergasted. @kabaim just flabbergasted me. Follow him and ask how he did it.”

Screenshot of my Twylah page. Click to see a bigger version.

@kabaim is Eric Kim, founder and CEO of Twylah, the new Twitter tool that Eric says is going to change the way we use Twitter. Twylah (@Twylah)does all these amazing things. So many of them, in fact, that I’ve probably forgotten a few them here.

Imagine going to a website that’s laid out like a magazine theme for a blog. On that page are your tweets, categorized by the topics you tweet about most. There, a visitor can see those categories, and read more tweets within each of them. The layout page will pull out any photos you’ve included with your tweets, and then organize the rest in reverse chronological order.

This does a number of things for you, for the reader, even for search engine optimization.

    • It lets visitors experience your tweets visually, rather than seeing an entire timeline. Don’t like one particular category, like your 90 minute ongoing discussion with your project team about where to have lunch? Replace it with one you prefer. Want to highlight a Twitter topic from two months ago? Drop a less interesting one and replace it with the old topic.

  • It can pull in tweets from weeks, or even months ago. This gives life to your tweets, beyond the typical 1-hour life expectancy that our tweets usually have.
  • Each Twylah page is a real web page. The links on them are shortened using bit.ly, which means they’re not only trackable, but they even count as backlinks to your real site. This will be a big help for anyone who needs an SEO boost.
  • You can direct people to your Twylah page instead of your Twitter profile page, giving people an expanded view of your bio. Now people can see if you’re a real person, and if you talk about what you claim to talk about.
  • People can even follow you directly from Twylah, rather than jumping back to your Twitter page to follow you.

 

These are all pretty cool features, and based on my scribbled notes, there’s a lot of amazing stuff that Twylah is going to do.

But, there are three things that social media marketers and practitioners need to take note of, because these things are going to be H-U-G-Efor social media professionals. Of course, these will not be included in the initial rollout of Twylah, but Eric expects them to be available around 6 weeks later. (I hope I didn’t just jinx that.)

Further down my Twylah page.
  • Users will be able to subscribe to a person’s categories of tweets. For example, if you’re following Douglas Karr, but only want to read his tweets about the Marketing Technology Blog radio show, you can subscribe to that category. Here’s the even cooler part: Those tweets will be emailed to you as a newsletter. Subscribe to several people and their categories for a bigger newsletter, and read their interesting tweets at your leisure.
  • Twylah will have an analytics package. Not only can you see how many times your stuff was retweeted, or how often you tweeted about certain topics/categories, but you can see how many people engaged with your tweets — retweeting, clicking links, etc. For example, if you tweet about the Android phone, you can also see the engagement with those tweets has gone up. If you also tweet about the latest Twitter meme, you may see that your engagement went down for that topic. Translation: You can adjust the topics, and even time, of your tweets accordingly, based on the engagement of your tweets by your followers.
  • Twylah’s analytics will also tell you what you need to tweet about and when, to help your engagement improve. Twylah will actually help you figure out when most of your network is actually using Twitter, and what sort of tweets interest them the most. What’s cool: This is especially useful for people who are very particular about following people with certain backgrounds, such as book marketers trying to build a following of independent bookstores.
  • Twylah will eventually aggregate the total engagement of different topics. Imagine being able to know which of Twitter’s trending topics are actually engaging the readers. Maybe the new iPhone 5 is one of the trending topics in July, and 20% of the people are engaging with those tweets. As an iPhone marketer, you would then know that you need to tweet more about the iPhone with links to important information, like nearest retail location.

A lot of these way cool Twylah features are still in the Alpha stage, while Eric and his wife, Kelly, are working feverishly to roll the beta out in the middle of February. If you want to be a part of the beta, go to Twylah.com and register. Also, ask Eric for a personal demonstration of Twylah.

You’ll be flabbergasted. I know I was.

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Six Reasons You Should NOT Feed Your Twitter Stream Into Your Facebook Stream

After yesterday’s post, Ten Signs You’re NOT a Social Media Expert, my friend Josh Husmann asked “Help me out! Why shouldn’t my twitter feed forward to Facebook?”

It’s a fair question, and it’s something I see a lot of people doing it. I even did it for a few weeks, until someone who wasn’t on Twitter told me to stop it. Here are six reasons you shouldn’t feed your Twitter stream into your Facebook stream.

  1. Most of your Facebook friends aren’t on Twitter. They don’t understand #hashtags and @replies. Your Twitter messages that contain those will just be confusing and/or boring.
  2. No one wants to read half a Twitter conversation, especially if they have no way of reading the other half.
  3. If you also automate your blog feed to Facebook, then your Facebook friends will get hit with two messages about new blog posts.
  4. If you’re trying to create an effective personal brand, then automating your feed will work against you. Take the time to write a custom message for both Twitter and Facebook.
  5. Facebook status updates can hold a whole lot more than a tweet. Why limit yourself to 140 characters on something that gives you a few hundred?
  6. Your Twitter audience is not necessarily your Facebook audience. Most of my Facebook network is made up of friends, family, people from high school and college, and people who live in the Indianapolis area. But they are not necessarily social media or PR people that I work with. A good number of my tweets are about business, social media, etc., and while I don’t mind sharing personal information with my Twitter stream, I don’t want to bother my personal stream with work information.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: NathanGibbs (Flickr)

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Ten Signs You’re NOT a Social Media Expert

Ten Signs You’re NOT a Social Media Expert

10. You updated your blog in December. 2009.

9. You’re convinced that Orkut will be the breakout social network of 2011.

This is not the same dude.

8. You’re feeding your Twitter stream into Facebook.

7. You think Chris Brogan was the star of “Jonah Hex.”

6. You’re still quoting the Malcolm Gladwell “10,000 hour rule,” unaware that you’re quoting someone who quoted someone else who didn’t actually read the book.

5. Your business email address ends with “@aol.com,” but you don’t work for AOL.

4. You work for AOL.

3. You play Farmville so much, Zynga’s revenues plummeted the week you went on vacation.

2. You tell people you had the high score on Technorati when you were in high school.

1. Your social media experience consists of your unpaid college internship at your dad’s accounting firm.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.