The past few weeks, I’ve been getting an increasing number of followers on Twitter. Gee, I thought to myself, I didn’t realize my random complaints about professional sports and financial news coverage were soooo insightful. Then I started checking out just where a bunch of these new followers were coming from. I ended up on a lot of Twitter accounts that looked like this:
This isn’t an ordinary person’s account. All of the tweets here are actually links to a web site for some weird looking work-at-home site. I’m afraid that I even visited. Hopefully, Firefox protected me from any zombie viruses because MUST EAT BRAINS, MUST EAT BRAINS…right, lame joke…anyway…
I think the strategy behind this Twitter account is that some people will almost automatically follow anyone who follows them. That means the weird web site links get distributed over Twitter to any of those people. It’s sort of a no-cost distribution network for spammy web links. As you can see, it hasn’t worked too well for this site, which has followed 1,342 people on Twitter but has only tricked convinced 56 people to follow them, about a 4% uptake rate.
Still, there seems to be a proliferation of these spammy web site Twitterers. I now block them as soon as I discover what they’re up to. I only wish I knew the proper or popular label for these guys. Spam tweeters? Spameeters? Twammers? Taking suggestions from the peanut gallery in comments!
UPDATE: I like this site/service for uncovering spammy twitterers called Twerp Scan, which I found via a posting back in April about Twitter spam on CNET’s Crave blog. So maybe “twerps” is the correct term of art.
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