Twitter Spam a Real Problem
We have multiple Twitter accounts – one for each of our websites – and we’ve been looking at different tools and websites that will help us with these accounts.
One of these websites was a site called youradder.com who claimed they could get us more followers. And a bit recklessley we registered with them without reading the ‘rules’….bad decision!
Within a few days one of our Twitter accounts was inundated with spam messages. You’ve probably seen the type we mean – “Finally found the BEST way to get tons of followers for FREE!” or “I just become a member of this AWESOME site that gets you TONS of followers”.
The unfortunate thing for us is these messages were posted almost continuously on that Twitter account causing us to look like spammers.
The ‘rules’ that we failed to read before signing up are listed as follows:
Rules:
1. You agree to submit your twitter accout credentials.
2. You agree to allow us to store your account information in our database.
3. You agree your account will be used to automatically tweet an update on your account for promotional purposes every 6 hours with the exception of VIP members.
4. You agree upon loging in you allow us tweet an update on your twitter for promotion.
5. You agree when buying vip there are no refunds or returns what so ever.
6. You agree to allow us up to 6 hours to put your twitter user name on the vip section.
7. You agree if you spam our site you will be banned from our service forever with out hesitation.
As you can see Rule #3 is the nasty one. However, even if we had read these terms and accepted the ‘one post every 6 hours’ we still would have been pissed off as the number of posts actually averaged about 4 every hour. We were looking like big time spammers.
The only way to get rid of it was for us to change our password on that Twitter account. This seems to have fixed the problem although we will be keeping an eye on it over the next few days.
There appears to be a chain of these sites all doing the same thing and it is really clogging up Twitter. Here are the spam messages I have found so far on unsuspecting Twitter accounts.
- Its truly amazing, I got 1000 followers in 2 days forr FREE: http://www.extrafollowers.com
- Finally found the BEST way to get tons of followers for FREE! http://www.youradder.com
- Sign up free and Get 400 followers a day using http://tweeteradder.com
- Finally found the BEST way to get tons of followers for FREE! http://www.addfollowers.info
- Get Hundreds of Free Followers A Day! http://www.iwantfollowers.com
- CHECK out this site, im a member of it, It gets you more followers: http://AddFollowers.net
- You need to check out this site if you want more followers: http://AddFollowers.net
- Sign up free and Get 400 followers a day using http://tweeteradder.com
- Get allot more followers! You should check out this site : http://AddFollowers.net
- I just become a member of this AWESOME site that gets you TONS of followers: http://followersnow.com
- I just become a member of this AWESOME site that gets you TONS of followers: http://vipfollowers.com
- I just become a member of this AWESOME site that gets you TONS of followers: http://morefollowers.net
- Hey fellow followers If you want MORE followers check out this site: http://AddFollowers.net
So we have learnt our lesson on this one – we aren’t going to sign up to anything with our Twitter account without first thorougly reading the terms and conditions and even then we are going to be extremely careful.
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I have been saying this from day one! Followers must be targeted to mean anything! You must build value and trust before you can ever market anything! Most people on Twitter are very clueless when it comes to the “art” of social media. :~}
Definitely have to agree with that Rich. We do look for targeted followers and even after we logged into that site we didn’t actually do anything with it as we didn’t like the concept. Unfortunately however they still kept our user name and password on record…hence the spam.
Ugh — absolutely! I had this very thing happen to me maybe a month ago. Lost more followers than I gained and rightfully so — no one wants to be spammed at! :S
Bb
That was what I was worried about. Fortunately we monitor our Twitter accounts so we picked it up pretty quick. We also sent out an apology to our followers.
Yes, I was wondering why my account followers was going up and down in membership levels by the day. I am surprised they can not stop these posts.
Maybe they could do a mass delete whenever the spammers website name appears but the only problem with that, as you can see from my post above, is that it appears these sites keep moving around under different urls.
(I hope i didnt double post this) I own a similar site, but it uses Oauth so no passwords are stored. My site also doesn’t automatically retweet our messages without your permission. If you wanna check it out it is http://boostfollowers.com
Ouch, that is indeed painful. I also believe that your followers should grow organically, otherwise you’ll lose them again in no time.
It is a good thing that you appologized to your followers! Respect
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