TweetBait – Not Watching Your Brand? Someone Else Is.
Like many, I have multiple Twitter accounts, one for my person / personal brand @jayweintraub and one for LeadsCon, @leadscon. Because I manage two users, in effect two brands, you can’t do it through the Twitter.com (easily). So, at the recommendation of a friend, I’ve been using Splitweet, which for the most part does exactly what I need – a way to view my accounts together. One of the keys in doing so means tracking my brands’ mentions, without having to perform a search or subscribe to #LeasdCon, for example, since not everyone tags their LeadsCon posts as such.
LeadsCon has a small number of followers, and not surprisingly, it generates almost all of its activity, around the time of the event. Going through those tweets, though, a few started to stand out. Happy as I was to see the additional volume, they just didn’t make enough sense. Here is one such tweet:
It wasn’t until a few started appearing that I began to get curious. Here’s a snapshot of them in context.
You most likely noticed two from different users with the exact same text but without the re-tweet. Again, for those not familiar with the event, it would seem a normal thing to say. Except as the brand owner, I know it isn’t. That comment was four months too late, but it’s not the tardiness of the context that is the real problem. The link being promoted is. Having been in the performance marketing, online customer acquisition space for quite some time, I am used to seeing crafty affiliate tactics. This ranks up there. A click on the link takes you to a business, just not one relevant to the conference goer, unless we are talking about what a conference goer does on their personal time. Yes, you guessed it. The link goes to an adult dating site – XXXBlackbook.
Like a webmail account, signing up for a Twitter account is a frictionless process. That’ makes deciding the real users from the fake that much harder. A click on one of the profiles above doesn’t go to a blank page with no friends/followers and zero tweets. It goes to a page resembling an active user at first glance. And, while it might seem like a manual process, those doing this type of spam have it all automated, from the signups to the followers to the tweets. And, while you can rid the system of spam, you can’t rid it of human nature. Hard to say if this will become a chronic problem, something akin to Google developing Quality Score, or simply a passing fad. Having finally made Twitter a part of my business, and increasingly valuable part, I hope they can squash this sooner than later. With the upcoming $100 million investment and increasing omnipresence, something tells me they will.
