Spam on Twitter is starting to get annoying. There are two main sorts: one is just a shameless plug such as
“Free advice Debt Relief“ Get confidence and 100% Free Debt Relief Help: www.gohere.com”.
The other is a sort of spam cascade where you get a tweet such as
“LOL! just saw a funny picture of you!! www.linktohackapp.ru”
When you click the link you suddenly find the same message has been sent to all your followers (I think I’ll start a collection of these & list them on my next post.)
So with everyone getting hacked off with the daily influx of dodgy tweets it is understandable that some folks want to do something about it. And on the face of it, signing up to TrueTwit, a “validation service for Twitter” seems to be a good answer.
But is it? As Loyd Grossman would say: lets look at the evidence.
You sign up for TrueTwit
Anyone who wants to follow you gets this message: twitteruser uses TrueTwit validation service. To validate click here: truetwit.com/linktotruetwit
Right. Who is this going to deter?
Spammers? No – they want to get their junk in front of you, so they will happily sign up to TrueTwit – simple one off process which means they will be pre-validated & get to follow you with impunity.
Decent folk? Well maybe. A lot of people will be too busy to jump through your hoop, or just not that motivated to.
Now doesn’t that seem back to front to you? The big irony of course, is that TrueTwit is supposed to prevent bot messages, yet the TrueTwit validation message is an annoying bot Tweet – and I get far more of those than any others.
So, if you get shameless plugs block them – even report them for spam. If someone you’re following gets caught in the spam cascade help them out (my next post will be about how to do this). But unless you want to engage with a small audience, think twice about putting barriers in the way of people who want to follow you.
(This blog refers to TrueTwit’s free service. I’ve never signed up to it so I can’t comment on the paid service. This blog by Bill Hibbler seems to provide a thorough review of this $20/year upgrade)