Posts Tagged ‘Spammer’

Your Twitter reach is defined, in large measure, by the number of followers you have. That means you want people to seek you out and to follow you whenever they have interests that overlap with your own.

Unfortunately, many people are unwittingly decreasing their follower counts. Here are two ways people are limiting their Twitter effectiveness.

No photo. If you don’t upload a photo, Twitter gives you that default avatar. You know who else ends up with that default avatar? Lousy spammers. Most robot accounts and spamming accounts feature that image because the folks behind them were too lazy to upload a picture. If you don’t have a picture, people will assume the worst about you.

Bad username. If your username is bad, you won’t get as many followers. There are two main instances of bad usernames that I see regularly. First, there are those with the long number sequence in the name. These are also the kind of handles that spammers end up with, so when I see one, I sort of assume that the owner is a spammer. If your handle is Bob199938, be prepared to be unpopular.

The other “bad name” is the one that makes it perfectly clear to the reader that you’re not very serious. This includes the profane usernames an silly ones like “ILuvMyKittyCats”. Get a good username.

Once you have a decent name, add a picture. These two “little things” can make a huge difference.

If you want people to see your Tweets on Twitter, you gotta have followers. Obviously, that can drive a person to commit himself or herself to building up the biggest follower base possible as quickly as possible.

One of the most popular techniques to get those followers in place is to start following others. There’s a tendency out there in Twitterland for those who’ve been followed to follow in return. That generous reciprocity can make it easy to build a follower list that will really turn heads.

That’s why following as many people as you can without setting off the “you’re probably a spammer or a bot” alarm is such a popular technique for new Twitter marketers.

There’s a problem with that strategy, though. It doesn’t work very well.

Yes, you get the followers. The problem is that you get a bunch of followers who aren’t really interested in anything you’re saying. They followed out of kindness, ignorance or because they’re not really a human being an they’re programmed to follow when followed.

When it comes time to market to that motley crew, you can guess just how effective it is. It’s like cold-calling the first set of numbers in the phone book or emailing random addresses. It’s not targeted and It doesn’t convert.

You best bet is to focus on building a truly interested and targeted social network. The results will be a lot better than what you get with the “big follow” technique.