Has Twitter Become Spam Central?

[JLogan]

Just a few years ago, twitter was still a place that hadn't hit the mainstream. Once it began going mainstream, every blogger and social media "expert" gave tips on how to gain a following. One of the main tips was to use hashtags to find questions that needed answering. Well, today we are going to talk about why twitter has become impossible to market on when you're a small site.

So, for a few days now I have browsed through hashtags related to my niche to find questions that needed answering. When I first starting doing this, the first thing I noticed was the extremely spammy looking tweets that filled the hashtag to the brim. Being the champion I am, in one day I sifted through about 500 tweets and was only able to find about 10 tweets that were worth answering.

After some time, I decided to start answering the questions people were using to attract attention to their website. For Example: "Do you use Twitter? - randomsite.com". But in reality, it seems a lot of people could not care less about your answer and just want hits on their site. An example of this is when I answered one user, and they challenged my answer by asking if I had read their article. To me, if you're asking a question I shouldn't have to read something to give an answer.

So, after a few days of answering the few questions I could find, I had only increased my following by 3-4 users. Which, I'm happy to have them but it really wasn't worth the trying to find the tweets to answer. The time could have went to something more productive, like a guest post or using a social network that isn't completely taken over with links.

I have my doubts that you can gain a following by being active on twitter. If you look at most profiles these days, people are either buying followers or following everybody they can to hopefully get noticed. Also, most bloggers don't use their profile much anymore (besides the slight few), because all I notice is syndicated hashtags and links. I feel twitter has become an insensitive social network if you're looking to advertise your small business or website. It has lost its meaning of connection, and has just become another place to post a link to hopefully gain a few hits. For now, I've given up on my twitter journey. I'll do the same as everybody else, and will just syndicate my links over. But I'll still check it on occasion to see if someone has mentioned me.

What are your thoughts on twitter?

Also, consider following me on Google+ or find some blogging tips on my blog.

 

[xpl0iter]

I completely agree with what you said. Twitter is becoming worse and worse and in a matter of time it will be used by no other than a few spam bot creators. Twitter will have to take some serious look at what they can do to stop the spam.

 

[JLogan]

I completely agree with what you said. Twitter is becoming worse and worse and in a matter of time it will be used by no other than a few spam bot creators. Twitter will have to take some serious look at what they can do to stop the spam.

Yes, but there isn't really a way to do that without some how affecting the legitimate people who are promoting on their platform. Even though I syndicate my links to twitter, I would still talk to people if there was actually a way to find those people who are needing help.

 

[MyDigitalpoint]

While I must admit that Twitter is actually full of spam, I cannot say a better thing for Facebook, which is not a spam central, but full of irrelevant, useless and junk content.

People try to starring their own movie posting things that are not only time-consuming to read but makes them focus on themselves and not in what is around them, so personally I have gotten better results from Twitter even today than from Facebook.

 

[lludawg]

Twitter nowadays is only good if you are a big business or a celebrity. If you are a small business, there is not much chance your posts will be seen. The average person only uses Twitter to keep up with their favourite celebrities nowadays.

 

[Alexis]

I always face people spamming on twitter. But the concept of twitter is simple, you don't receive people tweets if you don't follow them. So, the key is to be selective. You can either follow everyone and make a list to check out your favorites followers or accept only people with high quality tweets in your network.

 

[Jordan]

I always could not focus on twitter xD It seems to be more of a marketing website now days then what it was created for.

 

[Alexis]

I always could not focus on twitter xD It seems to be more of a marketing website now days then what it was created for.

I agree with you, Jordan! But even if you want to advertise on twitter, if you don't use the right methods, you'll spend your time for zero result! You have to be very smart to get your tweet seen; when you're writing 144 chars, there's 14 400 tweets waiting to be shown!

 

[xTinx]

I wouldn't say that Twitter has become a den through which spammers happily ply their trade. All I can say is that some people use it to promote their business - sometimes to an overrated and insensitive level. They follow you even when there's no strong connection and tag you in posts not related to the nature of your business.

 

[NyX982]

I won't even use Twitter anymore basically for those reasons. It just doesn't appeal to me the way that it use to. I do find that it seems like it's full of spam these days.

 

[Patrick Murphy]

Twitter is having some serious problems right now. Like you said it is mostly full of spammers looking for a quick way to drive traffic to their sites. Another problem is how low twitters user retention rates have become. They may have millions of users but most of them are inactive or only sign in once a month. It is a real shame because twitter could be a dream for a small business. Twitter needs to make some serious changes, first of all it needs to find a way to actually profitable. Otherwise I believe it is just going to fall to the wayside.

 

[PenguinManiac]

I would not say it's unusable nowadays, but it's surely far away from what it used to be. I mostly use it to follow the development of some projects I'm interested in, or to stay updated about recent events (it's still great for this), and, truth be told, I ran into just a few spam tweets. I must be lucky.
However, if we're considering the general trend, then yes, it's getting worse and worse. Users have to be more selective now, but I suppose this can be said for Internet as a whole, really.

 

[Tania]

Twitter has a lot of irrelevant messages on it but usually it is easy enough to filter them out. I have got to the point where I don't just unfollow I tend to block users who spam me.

However I do think it may get worse. Twitter announced this morning that they were disabling the Tweetdeck for PC client in April. Instead they are putting tweetdeck's features online through a web interface, and rolling many of the features straight into twitter. They haven't said whether they are charging for these features yet, since things like scheduled tweets used to be commercial if done directly through them.

My main concern is Tweetdeck with a web interface combined with auto-scripting in the browser will make spamming twitter far easier. Something like iScripts or Selenium webdriver which are GUI-driven could potentially allow a spammer to churn a lot of content very easily, where previously they would have had to use a bot or other script requiring a little technical knowledge.

 

[Fueledbycaffeine]

Well, recent news suggest users are actually declining and I'm pretty sure this pressure to get off twitter is mostly made up of real users and not bots, while spam and marketing are really on the rise. Twitter itself is very brain drained right now, a bunch of top executives have left the company for something else - it's not looking good, really. They risk being remembered for spambots, marketing and for being the home of a thousand ISIS twitter accounts.

 

[pwarbi]

I think with all forms of social media, there will always be a problem with spam as more and more people are using it to market and advertise their sites and products.

While I've had a Twitter account for a number of years now I'm not really that active on there, and personally haven't been troubled by spam on there myself, so I think as long as you take the necessary precautions, you should be able to keep the spam down to a minimum.