I’m following spam bots but not you
Awhile back, in an apartment building where I lived, I saw something very strange. A person had a living green plant situated outside their door in our windowless hallway. It sat there for days. Then, as I was getting ready to leave, I noticed something even stranger. The person had added a little plaster column outside their door and had put the plant on there as if it was a little porch. It looked really pretty, and it almost seemed like a good idea, but eventually the column and the plant disappeared, probably because the person realized that plants need sun, not just fluorescent light, to thrive.
This has been on my mind of late because I too had an idea that I thought was really good, but lately I’m being proven wrong. As I’ve mentioned here before, I hand-pick who I follow back and who I don’t. There are a few things I look for.
1. Do you have a picture of a human being, or do you look like an egg? I can’t assure myself that the person in the picture is you, but a picture is much more encouraging than a pastel egg.
2. Do you have your bio filled out? I’ve learned to distinguish between fake bios and real bios, so don’t think you’ll fool me that way.
3. What are your last few tweets like? Are they all RTs of your own stuff? Are they all tweets of your own blog posts? Or are you talking to people?
For many months now – a year in fact – these methodologies have really done well for me. But, much like a super virus, spammers always seem to get smarter, and I readily admit, I’ve been fooled by a few of them.
But I still didn’t follow YOU back.
Now what’s that all about?
How the spam-bots lure me into a sense of security
There are two things that spam-bots on Twitter have started to do that have showed the chinks in my following armor.
First, as I indicated above, they’ve learned that they look less suspicious if they fill out their bios on Twitter. Now, a lot of the spam-bots use variations on a theme. For example, a lot of them begin their bios with “Kansas by way of Indonesia plus a few years in Switzerland” or something like that. At first these traveling bios got me interested, but now I say yucky.
The second thing they do is they @ people, sometimes in ways that are obviously fake, but lately, they’ve been @ people in very convincing ways. No link involved, nothing particularly fishy. Just every few tweets, @so and so great to meet you!
It’s just downright mean. As much as I’d love to sift through every person’s every tweet to see patterns of behavior, I generally look at about, oh, three. If I see realistic @ replies within those first 3 tweets, I’m usually sold. Or was. Now nothing is sacred.
So why am I not following you?
By now you must be feeling very frazzled. You don’t do any tricks like that. You’re not a spam bot (are you??). So why would I let myself get fooled by these folks yet not take a chance on you?
Well…the spam bots they know what I like. Sort of.
So learn from the spam bots and try the following:
1. Use a human picture, preferably of yourself. You can use a picture of your infant, but that always kind of trips me up. How does a six-month-old know how to use Twitter? And run a business?
2. Fill out your bio. And use that space to tell me why I should follow you, please. I appreciate that ham is your favorite food and that you follow whomever you follow religiously. What will I gain from following you apart from your winning personality?
3. Talk to people. About stuff not relating to you. If I’m hedging on someone, I’ll click to their profile to see what else they’re doing. Sometimes it’s like that moment in The Shining. You think someone’s been tweeting their hearts out but all you see is “Thanks for the RT soandso, so and so, so and soo sooo, and sooooooo!” “Thanks for the RT s, t, tu, v, w, x, and yz!” Just a sea of thank yous, followed by a sea of RTs. It’s freaky, man. Talk to people like humans do. Er, real humans, not the bots pretending to be human.
4. Avoiding the temptation of spamming me is also nice. If you immediately tweet me and say, “Hey look at this neat link I found!” I will assume you are a spammer, even if the neat link is a website proving that the Big Foot is real.
5. Assurances that you are human are also helpful.
As a bonus point – if I see that you are engaging in chats, I will almost always follow you back, because that shows me you want to share, not just post and promote (or as I like to say, peepee).
There you have it. Save me from my new cult status among spam-bots and help me follow you instead of them. It would be a personal favor if you’re of a mind. And it might help you out too, which would be super awesome.
Right?
This is post #90 in The Engagement Series. Holy smokes, just 10 more to go!
Image by Sasan Saidi. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Sasan
22 Comments
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Bravo, sister. Couldn’t agree more – and this is so refreshing to see, esp after I disagreed so ardently w/the respected Mr. Coine’s pov on follow-backs.
At this point, I’ll interact with and likely follow anyone who interacts with me in an intelligent way. I had a new follower the other day who said: ‘Hi, Maureen. Happy to connect here. How’s your day?’ That seemed weird to me. Sure enough, I checked her stream and even tho she’s not a bot, it was clearly her schtick she used on everyone. I didn’t follow her back and of course she’s no longer following me.
The more intelligent path would be a legit compliment on something I’ve posted or ask me a clarifying question about something I said <– THAT'S how I know you're actually interested in connecting rather than just wanting followers.
Yeah…it doesn’t have to be a compliment, but I really do look for a legitimate exchange that person had with another person. It really helps.
I know that a lot of people feel that following back is a common courtesy – I think the same debate will apply to Google Plus as it rolls out. But I just sort of naturally fell into this modus operandi when I started on Twitter, and well, here we are 🙂
Margie! I’ve never been so shocked!
Never in my life did I expect to hear “peepee” cross your lips.
I love it! Live it up. Please keep the lingo coming. Very clever abbreviation, by the way. 😉
I know, I know. My language on this blog is getting out of control. And when I promised it NEVER would. So sad…=p
Margie, it sounds like you have a pretty good system for weeding out the bots. If someone immediately sends me a direct message asking me to look at their site or something that “I should see” is it fair to say that this person is a spambot?
I am still trying to figure out who is real and who is just messing with me.
Maybe this would make a good series (how to detect spammers). Just a thought, anyway 🙂
Thanks, Miriam
Auto-DM = Auto-unfollow in my books. This is not a good way to detect a spam bot because lots of ‘real’ people use them. ‘Thanks for the follow, read my blog, download this, like me on Facebook’ blah! I really dont like canned content and auto-DMs are not personal, they are not relevant (in a lot of cases) and they waste space in my inbox.
Sure, we could definitely cover that. In fact, this Saturday night is Twitter Q&A – we could discuss then!
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Sometimes I’ll click right through their Twitter profile to their blog to see what sort of posts they have there. If it is a blog filled with links to items to purchase I click my way to never never land pretty quickly.
Some people are slow to learn how to use Twitter so this occasionally yields big rewards for me.
yeah, that works really well a lot of the time. I did get fooled on one though. I clicked over and well, if I had been on a PC my computer probably would have died. Someone pretending to be a 100-year-old learning to blog and tweet. Sheesh. To be safe, copy & paste the link into your browser, don’t click!
Perhaps the discussion of spam catching techniques would be appropriate future tropic for the #tweetdiner chat.
You and Miriam seem to be on a similar plane of existence today. We can talk about it this Saturday at #tweetdiner because it’s going to be Twitter Q&A 🙂
Hi, my friend!
Great post on this topic as spammers/bots are becoming increasingly more “human” at first glance. In the past few months I’ve noticed these have been given more human bios, photos and handles. One techinique I use is to immediately look at their tweet stream, if there are no give and take conversations with other verifiable humans…you’re a bot.
See you out there, Margie. 🙂
Yep, that sums up my philosophy as well. Great to see you here and thank you for the comment!
I do not follow everyone back – sorry tweeps! Here is how I go about it. So the email that says they follow me gives me a lot to go on without clicking through to their entire profile. I can see how many tweets they have sent, how many people they follow, how many follow them, see their mugshot and their bio. First turnoff for me is someone who has 0 tweets, is following hundreds of people and is being followed by hundreds of people. Who are the twitterers following these people who dont tweet? What is the value except to get your number up? O, that must be it. The numbers game group. So, another clue is definately the egg as you mentioned here and the bio. I know its hard to write a bio, especially with limited characters but you can do it! Something is better than nothing. Then, if they pass all these ‘tests’, I always click through to follow them back and this is where I can see their tweet stream. Sometimes, I will abort and not follow back because of what I see. Its a case by case basis which is why sometimes it takes me days or even a week to follow someone back.
I’m right there with you Christine. I do my best to check in on my new followers when I can so that I can analyze who I want to follow back and who I don’t. Sometimes it’s a bummer because all of the people you don’t follow back may drop you, but hey, they woulda just spammed ya anyway, right?
Margie-
I’m fairly new to all this, but I find that I use similar techniques. No eggs, read a couple of the tweets, click on a few of the @, and a few of the #. I also agree with comments about trying to sell me something by DM early in the relationship.
I also quickly unfollow anyone who tweets something every 10 minutes all day long.
Good post. I agree with Marianne, might be a good topic for #tweetdiner.
Have a good one.
Thanks so much, Martina!
Sounds like you have everything quite under control 🙂
“Kansas by way of Indonesia plus a few years in Switzerland” I’ve had a quite a few of these; at first I was going to turn them away, but the chicks are just so hot. I think they like me…………..
*snort* Nice one, Bill. It is interesting, isn’t it, how “women” dominate the spam-bot world. I’ll have to look into that. Another gender gap!! 😮
Danger Will Robinson! Danger!
The other night on #smallbizchat I was joking that some spam bots have a higher Klout score than me. (Sidenote – I really hope that isn’t true)
I don’t automatically follow back either. No eggs. Zero Tweets – no thank you. No bio then no clicky. I do peek at their stream, and if that looks ok go to their website. I usually don’t follow someone back who doesn’t list a site unless it is clear they are a newbie.
While I dislike the auto DM’s, I realize that newbie may just not understand how that is perceived and may or may not unfollow.
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