With every Social Media tool that crosses the mainstream boundary, so does the spam syndrome come along. Spam is undoubtedly a signal of a maturing Social Media site (most of the times a Social Network) that due to popular demand and growth, makes people think of new ways to fool the system and spread commercial messages across the untapped resources that sites such as MySpace, Facebook or Twitter have.

But I came across a fascinating tendency in Twitter regarding to Spam. Twitter users are far different from the general Social Networking users as Twitter itself has a specific audience and a whole different modus operandi.

Twitter, as you might now, is based on users who follow each others’ tweets. This means you can only reach the people who chose to follow you. We can consider Twitter Spam, in a broader sense, as the use of the tool to, using a created profile that can assume a real person or a fictional character, spreads commercial messages that are somewhat out of context of what is the expected behavior and information you’d find on Twitter. It’s massively communicating a product or service when the followers neither wanted nor expected that from a fellow Twitterer. In the traditional Social Networks, you can easily add a bunch of people to cover account and spread commercial messages freely. But on Twitter, if the user doesn’t follow you back, you might as well talk to the wind because all you’ll get is what the users you are following are tweeting.

A really interesting article on Mashable shows us that in the Twitter origins, following a user who follows you was considered a polite practice but, with the growth of Twitter Spammers the oldbies are now much more careful with whom they add back. On another related post, Twitter users have stated that they wouldn’t like direct marketing via Keywords used on Twitter posts. This is a proof of natural evolution and adaptation inside a micro society such as Twitter and poses as an important message to marketers – if you are planning to bring your brand into Twitter, be sure you know the rules of the game and how each Social Network works.

Twitter isn’t a tool to gather users like sheep and massively broadcast a message with no added value. Twitter is a tool that is becoming more and more useful to spread information amongst peers that goes far beyond the “What are you doing?” status. So, if you are planning to user Tweeter, consider the following:

Once again, the keywords are information, transparency and relevance. Those are the main cornerstones for a successful Twitter implementation that turn your brand presence into added value and well received in the Social Network Community and not into general Spam to massively add users. It’s not the amount of users you have – it’s the quality of the information you feed them. That’s what makes a brand presence unique or just plain boring and bad for the brand.

I recently received a link to see what type of lover I am. I jumped to the gun immediately, as expected. I mean, who isn’t curious about those big issues in life. So, after filling out an extensive 5 question quiz that comprehended issues such as my favorite time of the year, I submitted my answers and eagerly expected my answer. It was then that the application asked me to send the quiz to 15 friends in order to see my answer. And that’s what I did. It was only then that I realized that I received the quiz via the same mechanism – somebody wanted to see what type of lover they were and innocently forwarded the quiz to 15 unsuspecting victims.
The truth is that the Facebook system for applications is ground-breaking in many senses – it allows companies and individuals to create applications related to certain content and that engage with the users to a certain extent. But they only work if the users have an incentive to push the application onto others in their social network. Therefore there are two ways – either the application is that good or there is a mechanism that makes the user has to send an invitation. Continue reading ‘API Spam – or The API Virality Patterns’