Poor Michael and Melissa Zeng. They have been trying to follow me with at least 100 accounts over the last year or so. I’m sure they are real nice marketers, and I’m sure they only want to siphon from my followers by following me… but no. And I don’t advise you to go to the Zeng’s spammy website either.  social-media-in-marketing.com sounds fairly legit, but it’s pure link bait.

And these guys

It’s really very nice of the Bangladesh-located spammers to use the same header image to show me what I could pay for my next 5,000 followers on Twitter. Oh, wait, buy why then does the account only have 300 followers? Hm, something’s not right.

Somewhere, in an internet cafe far far away, there are thousands of people spawning hundreds of thousands of fake twitter, facebook, and pinterest accounts. They are happy to then sell you a whole boatload of fake followers that will do nothing to improve your business or your reach, but it "might" increase your follower count. Would you send $29 to some unknown account selling you Twitter followers when you know it’s wrong. It might not be illegal, I’m not sure about Twitter Co’s T&Cs, but I can assure you there is nothing to gain from buying followers. And yet they keep popping up day after day in my following list.

Do your part. Put the Zeng’s to sleep by BLOCKING and REPORTING their fake Twitter accounts whenever you see them. And the blue-bannered sales teams should all be BLOCKED and REPORTED when you find them. Twitter uses flagging as it’s first line of defense in combatting spammers. So do your part, block these pests and give another kid in Bangladesh a job for a few more weeks as they have to create new accounts faster than we squash them.

This type of spam account is not to be confused with my other crusade against the leaders of social media showing by example how to flood the Twitterverse with repeat after repeat of meaningless tweets. That’s not as bad, but it’s bad, IMHO.

Do your part. Block the spammers and tell the leaders to stop spamming.

John McElhenney

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2014/11/twitter-spammers-simplified/

A Few Related Posts:

• Auto-Bots Are Killing Twitter; Why Auto-Social & Robot-Social is Bad
• Buying Twitter Followers? What Are These Scammers Doing?
• Twitter DM Problems – Spam Invading Our Twitter Inbox
• The Twitter Bubble; Don’t Let Your Number of Followers Fool You Into Feeling Influential

References:

• How Twitter Bots Fool You Into Thinking They’re Human – Fast Company
• The State of Twitter Spam – Twitter.com
• What to do when you Spam Twitter – Mashable

Check out the Strategist’s Notebook page and these other posts about online marketing:

• Workin Facebook < all the Facebook Posts in one place
• uber.la quickies < a streamlined takeaway from today’s best marketing sources
• Social Media University < 2 minute educational videos
• Social Business MBA < the reading list
• Becoming a Social Media Rockstar: The Quick Path < um… let’s discuss

Let me help you jumpstart your social marketing:

FluentSocial (Social Media Marketing)

FluentSearch (SEO, Google Adwords)

My Twitter War Against Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki:

• Why I Blocked Chris Brogan, Back
  
  To be fair, I could care less about what these two former rockstars are tweeting about now. They’ve become clowns and shills of their former selves. I’m sure there’s hope for Mr. Brogan, and I have faith that some day we will meet in the Twitterverse of reality and laugh at our little spat.
• Why Is Your Tweet on Repeat? No Reply Necessary.
  
  And to take it to one more extreme, to illuminate the fallacy of these two gentlemen’s delusion, let’s imagine that they unleash the full-robo on all of their social channels. If we begin telling marketers and individuals that blasting 5 or 10 identical posts and tweets and updates to ALL of their social channels is okay, we’re going to see a dramatic drop in the value of social media for all of us. So why stop at Twitter Guy and Chris? What’s holding you back?
• Twitter Is the Heartbeat of Social MediaThere are plenty of egregious practices being used in social media. But when the leaders and journalists behave badly, it’s as if they are showing us the way. Do Guy and Chris believe we should all queue up robo-tweets weeks in advance?
• The Shame of the Spammy Tweeter If you agree, start asking these guys, "Why all the robo-tweets, Chris?" Or "Hey Guy, I used to like your content but now your team of tweeters is just sending out random crap hour after hour. Why are you doing that?"
• Starting The Spam Social War: A Noble Argument or A Cowardly Attack And if you meet Mr. K or Mr. B in person or on Twitter, ask them about their use of auto-tweeting technologies. Say it was an honest question and you want an honest answer.
• Defending the Indefensible: Do You Spam? Do You Auto-Bot? 90% of what they tweet is bullshit, repeated by auto-tweeting software, to achieve some empty financial gain. Thanks for dropping the ball and giving rise to the permission-based spammer. Yeah, yeah, I know I can always unfollow you.
• Social Spam: Why Your Social Media Strategy is BS But if you’re going to broadcast duplicate messages all night and all day, you are doing it wrong. You are killing the trust we’ve begun to earn for social media and tools like Twitter and Facebook. Just stop the BS and stop spamming social.
• Master Tweeters Have Become Auto-Bots: @chrisbrogan and @guykawasaki Please Stop! I respect both these men. I merely hope and pray we can return them and their Twitter output to the human race before we’re all overrun by zombie tweeters.