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Mar
13
2012

Twitter Jail: What is it? What are the rules? How do I break out?

Category: community building,design & user experience,social media,social media marketing,tech opinion,twitter way — jmacofearth @ 9:50 am

In social media it’s worse than "I see dead people." When your browser says "You can no longer follow any more users." It is the social media equivalent of jail. Sleeping off your rampant Twitter Follow campaign may or may not help. Twitter’s not sharing the rules. In the name of protecting us from the spammers, they are keeping a few of the rules to themselves. Let’s look a bit deeper into this. What is Twitter Jail?

click to view full-size in Slideshare.net

Okay, so Twitter is not big on the large follow and unfollow practice. So what do you do, just wait it out? It’s clearly not my ratio that’s holding me back. And when does Twitter reset my 1,000 follows per day?

If Twitter is going to have rules they need to publish them. The scammers are already shredding Twitter and pushing a lot of people off the platform in their first week of use. The current dropoff rate is about 70% after 30 days. The average follower count is 27.

So how can Twitter do better? How would their phenomenal growth be hurt by limited and killing the obvious spam and porn accounts? How about UNPUBLISHING peoples FOLLOWER and FOLLOWING counts all together? Kill the numbers game? But then, why would we work so hard to get more followers?

If Twitter is going to mature into a real platform, where people use Twitter.com rather than the API-enabled Twitter Apps, they are going to have to do a much better job of 1. sharing the real rules; and 2. killing spammy and DEAD Twitter accounts.

But what is their motivation? I’ve created at least 30 Twitter accounts myself for various projects and client work. And I have gone back and deleted maybe 5 of those accounts. And I’m not a spammer. So what about the off-shore dollar-a-day worker who can create more Twitter accounts in an hour than I could follow in a week? What kind of limit is Twitter placing on them? How is Twitter *really* working to kill spam, and porn, and MLM scammers, and twitter-bots?

Twitter wants to express their success in terms of number of users. And even stats like "record number of tweets during the Oscars" has a nice *marketing* ring to it for the Business of Twitter. But if 50% of those #oscars tweets were for $100 gift card scams, and porn sites looking for fresh follows, what is the business *win* at that point? What would that amazing growth number and that "record-setting" number of tweets be if Twitter got serious about KILLING and LIMITING spammers?

If Twitter got serious about killing and managing spammy and dead accounts, their numbers would go down significantly. And why would they do that? Managing the crap on Twitter, currently, is not in Twitter’s best interest. But I think that will change.

Limiting and secret golden ratios are only hurting real users. Believe me, the brute force of low-cost labor is going to work around any limits and rules you set. For Twitter to make the transition into a real business platform in stead of a social media darling that no one understands, they will have to get serious about killing porn, spam, and scammers on Twitter.

It’s your call Twitter. What’s the answer?

Note: My real frustration at this moment is how to know when my Twitter Sentence has been lifted. I can’t know, I just have to keep trying to follow and waiting for more people to follow me. Or do a round of unfollowing.

Updated Stat on this Post:

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2012/03/twitter-jail/

Reference: Twitter Help Page: Follow Limits (I can’t follow people)

Here are the a few quick-start guides to Twitter:

Other posts about kicking ass in social media:

See all of the Social Media Marketing Videos on the Social U. page.

Tags: follow limits, how to use Twitter, the twitter way, twitter, twitter business, twitter follow limits, twitter following limits, twitter help, twitter jail, twitter limits, twitter porn, twitter scam, twitter spam, twitter way

Comments (4)

Feb
23
2012

Twitter Bot Brian C Arrives With a Business Offer that Sounds Too Good to Be True

Category: social media,social media marketing,tech opinion,trust & reputation,twitter way — jmacofearth @ 3:51 pm

Brian must not have read my post on Twitter Bots and the Bot Networks (Twitter Bot Network Invades Social Media for Business: How BotNets Work) that are starting to infest all of social media. Claiming to be legitimate businesses, these bot captains merely redirect their lifeless accounts to FOLLOW, LIKE, or ADD your account to show great growth. But since the accounts are bots there is zero business behind the offer. How long will a client think you are doing a great job, when the stellar growth produces no results?

Screen Shot 2012 02 23 at 3.39.30 PM Twitter Bot *Brian C* Arrives With a Business Offer that Sounds Too Good to Be True

Click to see full-size image on Slideshare.net

Here’s the first page of Brian’s business service. I don’t think I’m sharing any IP. (grin) It goes on with "bulk" pricing for multiple accounts.

Be aware and have fun out there. Let’s get social.

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2012/02/youtube-results/

See all of the Social Media Marketing Videos on the Social U. page.

Other posts about kicking ass in social media:

Tags: ADD bot, bot nets, business services, Follow Bot, follow bots, learning social media, learning twitter, Like Bot, like bots, scamming social media, scamming your business, social media scam, spam bot, thousands of followers, traffic bots, twitter bot, twitter scam, twitter spam

Comments (22)

Dec
04
2011

Twitter Porn, Twitter Spam, Twitter Bot Networks, Twitter Hacks – What I Think They’re Doing

Category: social media,social media marketing,tech opinion,trust & reputation,twitter way — jmacofearth @ 10:49 am

Twitter is a hard social media network to figure out. What’s making it harder is the volume of crap that is being spewed into the network. At first it was just porn companies trying to get you to follow and click on affiliate links. But today’s twitterbot networks are getting more sophisticated. Of course it’s a gold rush out on the social media frontier, and twitter is much more immediate than facebook. (See also: Twitter Bot Network Invades Social Media for Business: How BotNets Work )

Here’s a single slide graphic I just made about this trend and the types of bogus Twitter accounts you are likely to see.

Who’s Killing Twitter and Why Are They Doing It?

View more presentations from John McElhenney You can view or download the powerpoint slide here: Who’s Killing Twitter

The Takeaway: With huge networks of seemingly legitimate Twitter accounts (we’re talking 100,000+ networks) a spammer can offer social media services, through a seemingly legitimate business. Imagine their succcess when they can drive your company’s Twitter following up 10,000 followers in one week. And you can imagine their successful promotion of your Twitter business will continue to rocket up.

But what’s going to happen eventually, is you will notice that even with 20,000 followers on Twitter no one is clicking on your links, no one is visiting your site. And the excuse will be, Twitter doesn’t work at all.

And these scams are not just limited to Teeth Whitening services and coupons. The twitterbot networks are starting to get more savvy about appearing to be legitimate "business" or "marketing" focused. Look for large groups of follows and you can see this pattern. 7 – 8 new followers have pretty good professional photos, they’ve got unique bios, the might even have joined Klout and started to pick up K-points. But if you look at their tweets you will see that they tweet the same thing over and over. All of them at once. Just like they followed your account, they probably ReTweeted one of your more successful "social business-related" posts. Trying to establish even more legitimacy by connecting with your Twitter ID and your reputation.

I noticed the business Twitterbots two weeks ago, when a post of mine started getting some traction within the social media circles, and then over the course of an hour I had 75 new ReTweets. BUT, the tell was… the traffic to the post was actually not growing near as quickly. So I was getting all the "activity" all this word-of-mouth promotion, but only about 5% of the retweets were legitimate and were giving me any traffic. And the retweet was specifically to provide information about social media marketing results using YouTube.

Great topic, starting to be retweeted and the twitterbots join the hype and try to infect the real people interested in learning social media. I made a 1-minute video when I first noticed the business-twitter-bots.

I hope this helps. Might need to do another video about this. What do you think?

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth) Do let me know if I can help with your social strategy needs.

permalink: https://uber.la/2011/12/twitterbot-networks/

Check out the Social Media for Business page and these other posts about learning social media:

Tags: how to use Twitter, learning twitter, Twitter Bot Networks, twitter for business, Twitter Hacks, twitter marketing, twitter networks, twitter porn, twitter scam, twitter spam, using twitter, what’s twitter?

Comments (10)

Nov
23
2011

Bogus Posts Starting to Show Up in Social Marketing Channels (New Twitter Spam)

Category: social media,social media marketing,twitter way,videos — jmacofearth @ 8:28 pm

I was looking into some phenomenal twitter activity related to one of my posts, when I noticed the high volume of tweets wasn’t really correlating with a huge jump in traffic to the page. I used Topsy.com to look at some of the tweeters and found groupings of bogus tweeters broadcasting the same tweet over and over. They all look fairly legitimate until you dig into their bios. I called it a Twitter Marketing Scam, maybe it’s just spam. Pretty sophisticated network of tweetbots.

Watch Twitter Marketing Scam directly on YouTube.

I assume this scam is to build a large network of Twitter accounts within "business" networks and hashtags and then sell performance-based social media services and show fantastic growth and mentions by using these accounts to run up the numbers. Pretty slick. Pretty crappy.

Twitter Turkey’s moving into social business space. If I could just figure out how to activate them again, I could get this post to go viral! (grin)

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2011/11/bogus-tweeters/

Check out the Social Media for Business page and these other posts about learning social media:

Tags: bogus tweeters, social media scam, topsy.com, twitter, twitter business scam, twitter scam, twitter spammers, twitterbot, twitterbot network

Comments (14)

Jul
09
2011

Twitter Hack Could Cause Problems: The Latest Hack Got My Password (StalkTrak)

Category: community building,social media — jmacofearth @ 7:03 pm

[This is a Twitter Hack walk-through. How I got hacked, and willingly gave up my password to the scam. RE: StalkTrak, LTwitteri(d0t)com, “who’s stalking your twitter.” I’ve done it so you don’t have to. Another popular variant, DM “Is this you in this picture <link>?”]

Update 7-20-11: Just got this in my Direct Message inbox on Tweetdeck. The hack is still running folks.

Update (24 hrs): Steps: 1. UnAuthorize App, 2. Change Twitter Password. Seems to have done the trick, no further intrusions. Stay safe out there.

What was I thinking? I got what looked like a legitimate message about a new Twitter tool. And something about stalking. Perhaps that should’ve been the clue. But I went along for a looksee. And in the process opened my account up to a scam of some sort. Here’s how it got started.

Not sure what "stalks" means in this case, but I’m interested to find out.

Here’s what the site logo and URL look like.

They ask for an email address and a password.

And on the same screen is a Twitter OAuth link. It’s odd to have both on one screen. I was curious, and I was feeling somewhat bulletproof. So I authorized the "StalkTrak" to see what was what.

Regardless of what you put in, here is the resulting page.

And that was it. Nothing. I couldn’t tell anything from this mash of data and for a few hours, nothing suspicious happened.

And then late last night these started going out as DM message from me.

Okay, so I went back to Twitter and revolked the Twitter OAuthorization. Here’s how you do that:

And go to the

And I was comfortable that I was done. And I posted a few warning Tweets to alert anyone that had gotten a DM from me about LTitteri.com not to click on it.

And so at that point I figured I was done.

Until I checked back into my Twitter account. And found these lovely tidbits. I can see how these might really pose a problem for some folks. I think I’m okay, though. I think… (grin)

Okay, so one more trip to Twitter to change my password. Yes, dumbass that I am, the password I gave in the LTwitteri screen WAS also my Twitter password. Now that was Dumb. My own dumbness, that I’d been meaning to change for months. Okay, it’s changed now.

And it looks like the Twitter Authorities are on the scam as well. When I tried to click one of the original links from the bogus Tweets, here’s what I got.

Anyway, that’s what it looks like when you walk into a Twitter ambush. You go off on a link from someone (I did not know the original "stalk" tweeter) and give authorization to an app and then your stream gets flooded with crap. I’ve seen a similar scam on Facebook, usually with sex-ish topics in their pictures and subject lines.

Anyway, I wanted to warn you about LTwitteri. Stay away, check your Twitter Authorizations and change your password. Stay safe out there.

@jmacofearth

permalink: https://uber.la/2011/07/twitter-hack/

Another similar come on that’s showing up in my DM inbox: