Spam followers: Why aren’t you blocking them?

Why do we get so hung up on numbers? Do your grades in school really show how successful you will be in life? Do those extra 000s in your bank account make you a happier person? Does a larger Twitter following make you a social media expert? I would say the answer to all of these questions is “No”.

I registered for Twitter over a year ago, but didn’t use it too much. Simply because none of the people I knew were on Twitter and I didn’t find a lot of use for it. I used search.twitter.com to identify trends and such, but I didn’t tweet as much myself. With the installation of TweetDeck and TwitterBerry (now trying to use TweetCaster) I started to get involved with a Twitter a bit more.

I instantly learned what Twitter spam is: you type a certain keyword and you get bunch of followers who are either: bots, porn people or social media experts. My favourite kind is “social media experts” they usually follow like 10,000 people and 8,000 or 9,000 will follow them back.

Now comes the question—do you block those accounts which are obviously spam or do you let them follow you? I mean, you will look cool if you have more followers, right? Wrong, due to the simple fact that it is easy to see who is following you. So if you claim to be a marketing expert and have, say, 1000 followers and then your clients click on who follows you and sees names like Kelly4568 or Mandy124 what kind of expert are you?  Of course, if you have hundreds of thousands of followers it is hard to monitor new adds, but the majority of people don’t fall in that category.

This reflects very poorly on your brand and also, from a practical point of view, you can’t really use your twitter account to deliver message to the masses. You think those bots care about your new blog post? The internet is just a medium, marketing principles stay the same: to be an expert in “Social” you have to actually be social. Social means developing conversations and, in a marketing context, helping people satisfy their needs.

So fellow Tweeps who don’t block those accounts, why aren’t you? Agree? Or think I am full of it? Let me know.

@romanz

P.S. Definitely not a social media expert.

P.P.S. But I have couple of good ones working for me.