The Next Best Twitter Account Promotion Method Invented

For quite a while I have been witnessing people experimenting with the very same methods of promoting their accounts on Twitter without actually inventing anything new. In fact, these methods have probably existed for almost as long as Twitter itself has been available to the general public and they probably look boring to everyone already.

Both the traditional methods are absolutely legitimate and natural and can be used by normal Twitter users same as they can be by spammers – the difference is only in scale here. The first method is simple: you find someone, you follow someone, the person gets a new follower notification and may follow you back if he or she knows you or finds your tweets interesting (or probably automatically follows everyone back).

The difference between a legitimate user and a spammer here is that you will hardly want to follow thousands of Twitter users and unfollow them eventually to be able to follow more users – that is if you don’t want to build a list of dozens of thousands of followers to spam them with your updates or DMs. Also sometimes spammers unfollow people and follow them again to make sure the person actually notices them and hopefully follows them back (though lately I’ve been choosing to report people as spammers if I get 3 or 4 following notifications about their accounts).

The second method mainly relates to promotion of a Twitter account off Twitter itself: you basically push a link to your Twitter account everywhere you think people could see it – and wait for them to actually see it, click it and follow you on Twitter if they have an account. So you will hardly see a blog without the ‘Follow us on Twitter’ button, a profile on a social network that won’t feature the Twitter account of its owner and sometimes we all probably get emails from people with their Twitter accounts in their signatures in addition to their corporate URLs.

This method can also be used legitimately or in a very spammy fashion – and it is used by spammers who post the links to the Twitter accounts they promote everywhere they can, including comments on blog posts of bloggers that don’t suspect anything wrong from a commentator or wherever their imagination tells them people will click the link.

But today I have found out that yet another method of promoting Twitter account has been invented – and this one is 100% spammy because it actually involves using databases of email addresses that are heavily used by normal spammers that send you all those lottery winning notifications.

What is the method? Basically today I have received invitations to join Twitter from someone named Jenny (or pretending to be named Jenny). The emails introduced me to Twitter and invited me to click a link to learn more about Twitter. The only thing that was suspicious about the emails were the addressees: one of the emails was sent to info@profy.com (the general email address that is used to send news my way) while the second one was intended for advertising@profy.com (the address that I invite people who want to advertise on Profy to use).

I could have thought it was some mistake if not for the fact that I received the very same invitations to the two emails that are very impersonal and are not used for actual communications on my side at all. But what I know perfectly well is that both addresses are on tons of spam databases as they are easily available on various pages of Profy and can be easily added to any database to be used for spam delivery. So it was obvious to me that the invitations were sent using some of the spamming database – and not by some legitimate user.

So I decided that it could be some phishing attack where spammers pretended to send me legitimate invitations only aiming to drag me to some website to grab myself some malware or maybe by some meds. But I have checked the link and it was a legitimate Twitter link – and brought me to the account pretending to be Jenny.

So that was it: their goal was actual promotion of the Twitter account by inviting multiple people using some random email addresses – and hoping some of the email account holders are actually registered on Twitter as well and will be willing to follow them back. To do so they have acquired some email database and invited everyone they could to follow – hence the two invitations in my inbox.

To achieve the same results manually you have to go to the Find People section on Twitter and select the Invite by email tab where you’ll see a text field to paste the addresses of all the people you want to invite to Twitter – comma separated as you would expect. For spammers it is not even that much needed to automate the entire process as the invitation field makes it possible to paste multiple email accounts so a few copy and paste operations will do the trick perfectly well if you have a list of email accounts and a few hours you can dedicate to this dubious activity.

The worst part about this newly invented Twitter account promotion method is that some people may not suspect anything and will actually play the game by a spammer’s rules because everything looks pretty legitimate – so the method will probably be rather efficient and will generate the results the spammers are looking to achieve.

But no matter what the results of such actions will actually be in the future, now I definitely see that email lists will enjoy an increased demand from all those social media consultants and gurus who promote their services on Twitter after building a huge followership. The only prerequisite is that the email addresses should easily be extracted into a simple text comma-separated form not to make our gurus make some unnecessary actions additionally where they don’t want to. I suspect that these invitations I’ve received are probably some initial experiments but if you have your email on multiple bulk email lists, I’d prepare to get tons of such invitations from numerous Twitter users over there. And of course it is up to you to decide if you will choose to report those who invite you as spammers or not but I will probably choose to do so – just in case.

Oh, and you can follow me (@profy) should you want to hear me bragging about Twitter spam there additionally.