The other week an article in a local newspaper caught my eye. It was about someone in Perth influencing the Federal Election by using Twitter. Now, I love it when Perth people get some press; I think it’s great when local people get airtime.
However, this article annoyed me for two reasons: firstly, because it suggested that you have more influence on Twitter by having a higher follower count, and secondly because it also seemed to suggest that spamming people is ok.
The article used a very cool Australian web metrics site, BuzzElection, to discover that according to its numbers, a local grandmother had the second most influence on Twitter regarding the upcoming election. Buzz Election uses a very basic algorithm to determine this “influence” score: it multiplies the number of tweets a person sends with the hashtag #ausvotes by their follower count. A basic algorithm like that provides a fun top 100, but not something you’d take seriously.
Using this metric suggests that the more people you have following you, the better you are. Simply not true on Twitter.
What’s worse is that many people use morally questionable tactics to get as many followers as they can, because many people falsely assume that the more followers you have, the more important you are (or really, the more traffic you can drive to certain sites for commercial reasons).
So follower count means nothing, because many of the followers gained using these techniques aren’t really listening to you at all. They’re only there to try and boost their own follow count (and traffic). It’s like filling a small room with narcissistic sales people and giving them all loud speakers. This makes the follow count a useless measure of influence.
(For those who don’t know how people gain massive follow counts, this video gives you an example of how they do it while not caring about their followers in the process: How to Get 8300 Twitter Followers in 3 Weeks – I’ll Show You How)
The second thing that annoyed me about the article was the way this person was using Twitter. By their own admission they were essentially spamming their followers. “I tweeted about that 50 times in one day,” they claimed.
Now I do remember one of the many times they’ve done this, because earlier in the year I blocked this person for spam. They sent an @ message to me, about marine sanctuaries, with a link and asked me to reweet it. At the time I found the request strange because I’ve never expressed an interest in that topic. I had to question why someone would specifically target me with a link, and ask me to RT. So I checked their account to find they’d tweeted the exact same message dozens of times, to dozens of other people in the last hour.
It’s an admirable cause (I guess, but I’ve never really looked into marine sanctuaries), but it’s still spam.
Twitter’s own rules define varieties of spam, including, “If you send large numbers of duplicate @replies.” Or, to quote an e-book I recently stumbled across, “duplicate messages posted too quickly, one after the other, are regarded as spam.”
That means, if you send a large number of the same message to a bunch of people, you’re spamming Twitter!
Is this spamming Twitter?
So, at the time, I reported this person for spam, and it automatically blocked them. But, within months this same person was now being touted as one of Australia’s most influential people on Twitter. Why? Because they racked up a large follower count in only a few months, and then spammed them.
Is that social media? It doesn’t sound social to me.
Now, I’m a realist. I know this is going to go on forever. Where ever there is money to be made, people are going to try and abuse a system to make a fast buck. Just don’t expect us to be quiet about it. Especially when we now have the Internet and the ability to voice our own opinions.
So, I ask that when any of you find someone abusing a system like Twitter, you use the right methods to disarm them. The more of us that take action against the people taking advantage of the rest of us, the less likely it will continue. In Twitter’s case, please report them for spam!
