Twitter dropped the hammer on spammers, filing a lawsuit against five accused proliferators of spam on Thursday, April 5, 2012. I visited Twitter’s Help Center regarding “The Twitter Rules” and read the section concerning what Twitter considered spam. I also visited the websites of the defendants named in the lawsuit, some of which were no longer online. Twitter made it abundantly clear that they were targeting spammers that:
- Posted duplicate content repeatedly in a short period of time;
- Followed or unfollowed a large number of users within a short period of time;
- Used or promoted third-party sites that claimed to get users more followers (such as follower trains, sites promising “more followers fast,” or any other site that offers to automatically add followers to one’s account).
I am in no race to gain as many followers as I can, preferring to take the role of tortoise over hare. In that regard, I have used the method for adding more followers, which I outline below, for some time. It requires no third-party tools or sites and is a very gradual method, indeed, but it allows me to engage with my new followers. After all, the point of social media is to engage, not gain as many followers as you can. If you take on too many followers at one time, you won’t have time to get to know them and they will be anonymous to you, thereby defeating the purpose of social media. This is the general outline:
- Go to the profile of a user whose content is regularly retweeted (RT) by others;
- Find a tweet from that user with many RTs;
- Compose a new tweet using RT or “via” (I outlined different ways to retweet in a previous blog), making sure to post the username of the person who originally tweeted the content, followed by two or three usernames who RT’d the tweet.
I will demonstrate with a tweet from @TweetSmarter:
School’s Out: How to Start a Career in Social Media: http://bit.ly/I91LQR
A number of users have RT’d the tweet, as expected. I can construct the retweet as either this:
School’s Out: How to Start a Career in Social Media: http://bit.ly/I91LQR RT @TweetSmarter @stephstweets @Jankovitch
or this:
School’s Out: How to Start a Career in Social Media: http://bit.ly/I91LQR /via @TweetSmarter @stephstweets @Jankovitch
Why do I go through the trouble of composing retweets? I do it to RT the content of that person, something I do regularly, anyway, but also to recognize the people who also thought the user’s content was worthy of being shared and duly RT’d. If I am lucky, those two or three users in the retweet would follow me and, of course, I would follow them back in kind. Isn’t it a lot easier to get to know two or three new followers at a time this way?
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