Twitter is being spammed by Black Hat SEO’s to drive traffic to their websites, twitter profiles and blogs. This is ruining the social media phenomenon and taking away from the community building that is responsible for Twitter’s recent rise in popularity.
I am seeing this more and more lately, and wanted to point out some of the less than savory tactics that are being used by these “Black Birds” so that you can spot them when they come to be your “Friend”. This is in no way intended to be a list of tips, so the focus will be on some of the more obvious tricks that are currently being used, and I’ll stay away from some of the lesser known tactics.
5 Common Twitter Black Hat Tactics
I absolutely hate these tactics and feel that they could eventually hurt the platform if marketers continue to abuse them. I merely point them out so that you know what kind of people you are associating with on Twitter, and you can make an educated decision on whether or not to continue that association.
- Follow / Unfollow – This is probably the most common tactic that annoys everyone. Someone adds several thousand followers hoping that they will follow back, and then shortly thereafter dumps all of the people they recently followed, hoping that they don’t notice and continue to follow back. This is especially annoying when you see your number of followers fluctuating throughout the day, and you are truly trying to make connections with people you see as valuable.
- Unfollow / Follow – This is the reverse of the previous tactic. When you start following someone, you show up at the top of their followers list. Black Birds will unfollow you, and then come right back and follow you again so that they are shown at the top of your list of followers. The hope is that they gain some additional followers by being associated with you. This primarily happens to users with who follow a lot and are followed by a lot as the followers of these users are often great lists of people to follow.
- Account Spammer – This is an obvious one. A Black Bird creates multiple accounts so that they can continuously re-tweet their own spam and try to create a viral effect with their tweets. This person is usually involved with the above listed tactics as well, but takes this blatant form of spam and throws it in Twitter’s face. Obviously this can be policed if Twitter sees the same accounts re-tweeting the same content regularly, much like Digg outed some marketing firms for the exact same tactic. The problem is sorting through the re-tweets that happen naturally amongst friends, and not being an iron fist that delets accounts on a whim. Perhaps a social police method would work best for outing these chumps.
- Autofollowers, and AutoDumpers – One of the great things about Twitter is the many apps that can be used to manage your Twitter stream and keep up with friends. The negative is that the same apps can be used to abuse the platform and make the black hat techniques extremely easy to do. There are many scripts that will automatically follow your new followers, and automatically dump people who un-follow you. This is not a bad thing in it’s purest form, but for the Twitter Black Hat it is a tool to artificially manipulate your follower count and appear as though you are someone important that everyone should follow. It artificially pollutes the Twitter stream with marketing garbage, and makes it harder for you to follow those people that provide value.
- Autofollow Lists – It is easy to pick out those who automatically follow just about everyone who follows them. They will normally follow more people than their number of followers. Twitter has placed a cap on accounts allowing them to follow no more than 110% of their number of followers. Still, these accounts are easy to spot and has been documented both in this Twitter Autofollow blog post as well as the AutoFollowList Twitter account. Following the people on these lists will normally equate to a followback within 24 hours and thus helps to inflate the spammers’ numbers.
There are plenty of other black hat techniques being used and new ones are popping up every day. Is it wrong to use these techniques? For many, the answer is no. Twitter is becoming an extremely popular social networking platform and many users are doing whatever it takes to get better numbers.
In the end, it isn’t so much how you get your followers as much as what you do with them once you have them. Trying to get a ton of followers in itself is not necessarily black hat. Getting a ton of followers and then tweeting your latest MLM tips, Forex tutorials, and porn videos is what truly defines spam and establishes the need to control black hat techniques.
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It nice to know about these things, but get a life. This stuff really isn’t that deep. And if you are basing your livelihood only on internet marketing I have a bridge in Manhattan to sell you. The reason why I say that is the Internet is like building a castle in the sand. Things happen so quickly if you aren’t balanced you can be wiped out.
I really don’t care when people unfollow me. I’m more concerned I get my communication to the people I want my communication to. If I don’t like what people are tweeting I can simply block them. Who they follow and unfollow isn’t that important to me.
Thanks! I was looking for a new bridge!
You’re certainly enitled to your opinion, but as a Marketer, your goals are not just to get your message out, but to understand the systems involved with the data distribution. This is how you learn to beat the system, or at least get as much performance out of the existing perameters.
My articles and blog posts are written with the marketing goal in mind, all else is second. The point of this isn’t to say that you should or shouldn’t care about your followers, or blocking the bad ones, the point is to discuss marketing tactics, and how Twitter fits into the picture.
– And you can make a very good living in Internet Marketing if you know what you are doing
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
You would probably like this rant from 2006, “SEO Rant,” located at href=”http://www.odomit.com/20061016_-_seo_rant.php .
Anyhow it is interesting to note that with the insane influx of self-proclaiming SEO experts that it is becoming a skill to be able to work with the SERPs, which are not really watered down so much as they are stirred. This is unfortunate, and only weakens the internet community, or social media. It is the responsibility of the person(s) handling the marketing or SEO campaign to do the public a good service rather than a disservice through their actions.
Hi!
Had a good laugh at this – who said a sheathed sword cannot cut? you peppered the right keywords and broadcasted the post loudly on your Twitter stream, and that is as white hat as it gets. Nice rant!
Where well-intended people like yourself (and generally self-proclaimed white hats) need to blur their discourse is on the “ruining the social media phenomenon” – I noticed twats being overly nice and avoiding debate just to preserve their following flock and prevent disturbing them. Featureless self-appointed opinion leaders remain a major source of Web2.0 noise, of the same quality level as SPAM (zero). I for one do not advocate black hat techniques, but vomitwitting niceties is just as bad. How about this as a rant? Care to take it a little further?
all the best,
BT
True on the phrase “Ruining the social media phenomenon”. Social is as social does, Forrest… so whatever it evolves to is the “right thing”. While I am still opposed to “black hat” in general, separating black hat from gray, from white is a matter of interpretation, and in the world of marketing, succeeding is all that matters. I just put out my info and hope that it is helpful to someone. I lose some followers, I gain some more, but it’s all me.
thanks for the comments,
Chris
At first I was thinking that black hat was the wrong term for this – but thinking about it a little more – it is spamming – maybe it’s more poor marketing. I’ve probably unfollowed more people in the time I’ve been active than I’m currently following. I’m a real estate agent and for about 3 months I was showing up in the top 15 for the term real estate in twitter search people – I hated it – people followed me because either they were spammers or were looking for a collection of real estate people. I don’t really pay much attention to the people who add/delete me any more. I add followers only on my terms and I’m quick to unfollow if I realize I’m not enjoying their twitter stream. If you really “know” who you are following then it is easy to avoid the spammers – if you discover you are following accounts like this, hit the unfollow button – you won’t miss them a bit.
(white) hat off to you, Chris – you pulled that one out nice “succeeding is all that matters”. The Social Media Club has only one rule – there are no rules, so we’d better keep our eyes open.
Good post, well done!
Very interesting list! Like anything else worthwhile, many people will try to game the system for their own personal gain. With Twitter still being relatively new, it’s pretty easy to do so right now, but hopefully they’ll be able to tighten things up and clean up the spam.
Another one I’ve seen recently is when folks sign-up for free webinars or radio shows and then parrot the information they are receiving right into twitter as their own. Maybe this isn’t Black, but it certainly smacks of plagiarism and just plain laziness!
Twitter is full of plagiarized info that people are claiming as their own. It’s really not a black hat technique, but just spam that is spewed by people who don’t have the creativity or original ideas of their own to share. It’s a problem because it just contributes to the overall noise in the social space.
Thanks for commenting Scott.
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Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?
I think the most important factor on any social site is not how the person gains their followers, but how they interact once someone has decided to follow. It’s so easy to drop someone who isn’t interesting or engaging, you have to provide value or a social connection to make it work. Thanks for visiting us.
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