Posts Tagged Twitter

I’ve just seen yet another tweet proclaiming that by following some system or registering on some website you can get 1,000′s of new followers in a week. Although some of these sites may work, you’ll probably only get spammy followers, looking to bury you under a sea of DM’s. As I’ve blogged before, I created a Twitter account for one of my projects. Basically what happens is I collect news stories from most South African news sites into a Digg-like site. I then tweet all these headlines to a Twitter account. When I created the account I manually followed about 200 South Africans, just to get the ball rolling. I then signed the account up to TweetLater, and checked the setting to automatically follow any people following me. That was about two months ago, and the account now has more than 1,500 followers. People just naturally started following the account.

So what does this mean to the average Twitterer? Just post regular, value-adding content and the rest will happen automatically. In addition to this, you’ll find people who actually want to listen to what you have to say, not people just looking to increase their follower count. Actually, saying (typing?) it now makes it seem incredibly obvious. Remember people, there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or 1,000 genuine Twitter followers).

One of the most annoying things about Twitter is auto direct messages. Someone follows you, you follow back out of courtesy, and in return you get an automated message from that person thanking you for following them. Multiply this by 10 or 20 new followers each day, and a new form of spam is born. I must confess that shortly after I joined Twitter I signed up at TweetLaterand I enabled an auto DM to anyone who followed me. However, once I started using Twitter I realised how much of an annoyance this is and I disabled it on my account. Because of automated DM’s I started ignoring all DM’s.

Fortunately, it’s possible to disable most automated direct messages. Most automated messages comes from two service providers: SocialToo and TweetLater To opt out of automated DM’s from TweetLater, just visit their opt out Twitter account and follow the instructions.
1.    Follow @optmemout
2.    Wait for the follow back
3.    Send @optmeout any DM
4.    Unfollow @optmeout

To opt out of SocialToo:
1.    Visit www.socialtoo.com
2.    Register for an account, filling in your Twitter account details
3.    Once logged in, click on the Preferences tab at the top right corner of the window.
4.    Enable the option “Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other users”

Since I’ve completed these steps, I’ve seen a drastic reduction in the number of automated direct messages. A few still comes through, but it’s not nearly as spammy as it was before.