The Twitter Follow, Unfollow, Follow, Unfollow Social Media Spam Trick
By Mindy Gofton in Social Media Marketing on Thursday, July 23, 2009 @ 17:15
Quite a mouthful that title. But to be fair, the latest form of Twitter spam is producing a lot more email in my junk folder than I can digest. The latest trick of the ever-present social media spam kings appears to be following you on Twitter and if you don't follow back, unfollowing you a day or two later so they can follow you again, thereby ensuring you get another notification email.
When you ignore that email they repeat the same thing. Ad nauseum.
Our @searchdesigndev Twitter account has received since Mid-May, well over 90 such requests from the same network of clueless marketeers under the various names of @DazPeters, @GilesBounty, my personal favourite - @RayDollarBill, @cashmarketing, @marketingcodes, @seodirection, @carefreecash, @webdesignbournemouth, @sailor_james and more.
For example we have @dazpeters on May 26:
Again on May 30:
Again on June 5:
Then on June 13:
There's more from June 17th, 25th and 28th, July 7th, 10th, 16th 19th and 21st - I won't overload you with the screen shots.
Interestingly all these accounts appear to be linked as they're all very short on content (with follower numbers in direct opposition to the minimal number of tweets) and all seemingly looking to drive traffic to @imsucks, @smokefreetips and @theseogod.
For example, from @dazpeters:
From @marketingcodes:
@theseogod and @imsucks may know SEO*, but they don't know social media. If they did they wouldn't be using a bunch of junk shell accounts to promote themselves and their clients.
What they would be doing is encouraging their clients to create their own accounts and to use those accounts to engage with people, to discuss the actual issues relating to their businesses and listening to find out what customers and potential customers really want.
Social media will only help your business if you use it the right way. Driving volumes of traffic from followers is meaningless if they leave straight away and having masses of followers is pointless if you don't engage with them.
Social media is a real opportunity for businesses to bring the shop floor online and develop and cultivate those personal relationships with clients that disappeared when the shop floor turned into a website and face to face selling and customer relationships turned into website content and contact forms.
When it comes to social media, don't take advice from just anyone - make sure the person helping you actually knows how to use social media before they damage your business by misusing it.
*Or they may not, we haven't checked.
Ben Bradley wrote:
Jul 23, 2009 - 23:06Sure there are some using twitter in a misguided attempt to drive traffic. But there are others that are using the same techniques (and shortened URLs) to drive people to malware sites.
Here's a few links...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10007323-83.html
http://mashable.com/2009/06/21/twitter-trending-malware/
It gets uglier when an existing brand is used as part of the spam to malware campaign.
The proliferation of malware sites that use trademarked brand names in their source code is a hot button issue for many of my clients. A review of their stats makes it is easy to see why; a comparison of the aggregate number of malware incidents reported from January to December 2008 versus January to June 2009 shows a mind boggling 300% increase.
Here at BrandProtect as infected sites containing our clients' brand terms are identified we work with domain owners, ISP's and registrars to quash them. These sites cause havoc in cyberspace, but with exemplary co-operation among industry colleagues they tend to come down quickly.
Here's more info if you have any interest...
http://blog.brandprotect.com/Blog/bid/18409/Mad-about-Malware
Mindy wrote:
Jul 24, 2009 - 08:19Thanks Ben, that is a good point - be careful who you trust and what you click on social media sites.