04.08.08

Twitter rope-a-dope

Posted in Social Tools at 8:46 am by Mosey

This morning I got one of those odd Twitter follows we all have. You don’t recognize the name and you aren’t sure who the person is, but they are following your Twitter. Now, this one happened to be a beautiful Italian woman,who talked about her family, not technical, or SEO or SMO or anything related to my hobbies.

The first question was why did she follow me, or what bot decided she should follow me if she is using a some tool.

My next thought, err, ok, third thought after I noticed she was a beautiful Italian woman, was that there is a strategy in this.

Most people are, frankly, overly social with their social media. Link them in, they link you back, add a friend, they return the favor. Even Twitter suffers from it, someone follows you, generally, most people follow them back*.

*statistic from the Department of Stuff not Proven

The strategy is this, and it isn’t a good one, and I don’t endorse it or even think it is ethical, but here it is.

It would be very easy to set up a twitter or 100 and put an attractive picture on the account, twitter up a hundred or so updates with “real” things, “going out to Pedros, love me some tacos” or “tanning in 10 minutes”… whatever.

From there, add people, bot style of course, follow and follow and follow, slowly until people follow you back. Most Twitter users haven’t grasped private messages which means there isn’t an easy way to go “who is this?”

At minimum if you get a follow most people look to see the profile in the email announce.

Still with me? Good… so your bot is adding people fast and furious, about twice or three times as fast as adds are back. You now have a few hundred (thousand?) followers of your cute photo and nonsensical tweets. I doubt anyone is really @tweeting your posts.

Now you switch, captive audience, large base new tweet “found this great site…” or “wtf [url]” which is of course placed. If you are subtle you get a good boost of traffic because all us twitterfolk love some links to click on. Plus, the tinyurl means you can’t see it is for http://hot-anal-action.be/freepreview.htm

Do it right and you probably have a two week lifespan of spamming your followers before they drop off. Of course if too many people do it Twitter will evolve and fix itself and people will invent tools to avoid that, but the first person to try it can get some cheap consulting results for their vix@gr∂ client or whoever thinks this is actually a good idea.

Again, not endorsing this idea, just saying I see it coming.

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