Like all popular services, Twitter gets abused too. Who would’ve thought? Will spam kill Twitter? Well, do you still use email?
Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Twitter, which is still pretty much in its infancy to a communication medium that has been around pretty much as long as the web itself, but with the momentum that Twitter popularity is gaining, I can’t see it being incredibly threatened real soon.
Have a phone? You get telemarkters. Use email, you get spammers. Use Twitter? You still get spammers. Whatever the next big thing is, I can pretty much guarantee it will be exploited as well.
There have been many complaints lately about Twitter spam. A Bloomberg article looks at this situation.
“Twitter users post 140-character updates about their lives, making the site a potential goldmine for marketers wanting to know what customers are thinking about,” says Bloomberg’s Joseph Galante. “While Twitter Inc. could make money by charging companies to send ‘tweets’ to potential customers, the corporate babble may alienate users, threatening to stem the 18-fold growth in visitors in the past year.”
It’s true that marketers love Twitter. There is a ton of potential for it as a marketing channel. I’ve certainly championed the idea as much as the next guy. That said, there are ethics involved. Just like with email, there is spam, and there is legitimate email marketing. You opt in for legitimate marketing messages. You also opt in to follow people (or companies) on Twitter.
They can’t direct message you unless you follow them back. Yes, they can talk at you with the @username strategy, but looking at those is basically the Twitter equivalent of an ego search on Google. Yes, people often use the @username to talk directly to you instead of going the direct message route, but thats on you and your friends. Direct messages are there for a reason.
Twitter’s Spam Watch Account
You also don’t have to make your tweets public, which will make it a lot harder for businesses to find you if you dont’ want to be found. The point is, there are precautions you can take if you don’t want certain companies or people to interact with you.
Now getting the automatic emails every time someone chooses to follow you is a different story, and one that I would not be surprised to see addressed by Twitter in the near future. Now that Ahston Kutcher and CNN have made headlines by breaking a million followers, many more people are going to try to go down similar paths (not that they’re not already doing so).
Businesses should exercise some discipline in their own Twittering. It is just not good business practice to annoy people. That can be just as damaging to a reputation as someone spreading tweets about your product being bad. And if you’re already within the channel that is Twitter, you’ll just be setting yourself up for backlash.
