Can tweets be spam?

March 31st, 2008 by Andy Merchant

This post is a follow-up to my post last week entitled Top 10 Twitter conversationalists - What’s their motive? Where in the final paragraph I asked a number of questions:

• Do they have a vested interest in being seen as top social media communicators? Or are they just spreading the love?

• Why aren’t there more non-technology people conversing on Twitter and do they even know what Twitter is?

• And are they using Twitter correctly or is Twitter just fast becoming a self-promotional tool called Twitpromo ?

The post was well received with a number of bloggers from the list leaving some nice comments. End of subject.

FAST-FORWARD TO SATURDAY AFTERNOON

I follow around 90 people on Twitter, so not a great deal, but on Saturday my TwitterFox pop-up was on fire with one particularly well known blogger ” Scobleizer” - a well respected blogger.

In the space of no more than 40 minutes I had received 36 Tweets spread over 3 pages, bearing in mind each page holds a maximum of twenty tweets. So out of a possible 60 tweets, 36 were from the Scobleizer - over 50%.

So a little bit of maths tells me that 16,447 follow the Scobleizer and they all would have received the same 36 tweets in the same 40 minute time span. So in essence that’s a grand total of 592,092 tweets being disseminated from one user in 40 minutes.

While I hate to point the finger at one individual (it’s nothing personal Scobleizer!), this raises the point that if those same tweets had been distributed in the form of an email, in that amount of time, it would be called spam.

I know what you are going to say, “it was your choice to follow him” and ” Twitter is a totally different platform to email” - and you’d be right on both counts.

The reason I do follow these people is to learn and participate in a sector that I am very interested in, and then apply it into my PR/social media consultancy role. And one thing I have come to realise from this experience is that the Scobleizer is doing his own PR very well!

If you want to know more about the Scobleizer check this video out: Robert Scoble Insight Into Professional Online Publishing, Personal Branding, Social Media, and if you want to read some questions that Joe public would ask the Scoblizer, click here: What Would You Ask Robert Scoble?

Below are the screen grabs of the Scobleizer Tweets.

12/20 tweets were form Scobleizer

15/20

9/20

                              

Tags: , scobleizer, Social media, tweets, twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Blog, Blogging, Digital communications, Social media, Social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.