Twitter Is Everything, It Could Even Be A Source Of Extra Income For Spammers

May 27, 2009 | 

Svetlana Gladkova


Twitter seems to be just about everywhere these days and every news publication seems to have a purpose to link Twitter to every news event they cover – related or actually not. And while Twitter is becoming increasingly popular, everyone seems to have realized that the power of using Twitter is in the number of people following you so the more followers you have – the better.

Have you ever received a DM after following someone offering you to get dozens of thousands of new followers in just a few days for a very affordable amount? I have received quite a number of such messages and they are more than irritating already, especially for everyone who also happens to realize that even dozens of thousands of followers will not do you any good if they don’t listen to your updates or if they all are fake accounts created specifically to sell such huge following packages.

Where a few months ago every third person who followed me had some type of “social media consultant” or “social media guru” in their bios, by now I have noticed another trend shaping: that of people focused on selling new Twitter followers to everyone who wants to get them. Every day I see at least a couple of new followers who have something like “Get 20 thousand followers on Twitter today!” for their bios and updates promoting the same “noble” goal.

So it already seems to me there’s a whole business around Twitter followers with some people selling them in large batches to other people who think they can easily gain a huge number of loyal followers on Twitter without investing any time and real efforts. I don’t know the amounts that are involved in such transactions, but I think it should not be expensive – as just about every pure virtual service that is about social media.

Yet it now looks like people’s fascination with Twitter and its huge power moves off Twitter itself and will probably penetrate all the other aspects of our lives – and soon. The latest example I have found in the spam folder of my email account and the only thing the spam email was focused on was not selling me something I did not need: the only thing they wanted me to do was follow them on Twitter. Here is the text:

****** is pleased to invite you to follow us on Twitter, the new face of social connections.

We’re keeping it simple: FASHION, TRENDS, PR and the fast lane in LA.

“Follow” us and be the first to know about all of our latest and greatest news and gossip, just click the link: https://twitter.com/*** and enjoy!

and YES…if you follow us, we follow you back

Now I do know how far various web publishers can go to grab a little more eyeballs from new sources but spamming people only to invite them to follow you on Twitter seems like something new and unexpected to me. At some point in the early days of blogging I remember it was supposed to be cool to email everyone you knew the link to your blog and invite them to visit and subscribe.

Now it looks like the cool trend is to spam people with your Twitter account and invite them to follow you – even though it may sound strange to pay for a whole spam campaign to spread the word about your Twitter account in this manner. I am not sure if Twitter following spam emails will also turn into a popular online trend or if they will ever replace the usual Viagra spam in our inboxes (but given that there is quite a number of people selling Viagra on Twitter already, chances are really not bad here), but it looks like spammers will probably have a new interesting thing to offer their customers: mass mailing targeted at building a huge number of Twitter followers only. And who cares how these customers will use all those followers?

Oh, and to save me some money on a spam campaign, I would like to invite you to follow me on Twitter as well – I won’t promise thousands of followers but I promise a real conversation over there.

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