Will spam kill Twitter?

Paul Cheney at Conversational Media Marketing asks an important question about TweetScan, a Twitter search engine:

Lately, I’ve received notifications that I’m being followed by those who’ve set up Twitter accounts strictly for marketing purposes. For example, I’ve tweeted that I was about to go on a diet. Within a day or two of mentioning that, I received notices that @flatbellydietin, @trxworkout and @weightlossdie were following me. It could be merely coincidental, but, then again, given Tweet Scan’s ability to search by keyword, perhaps not.

Are we facing a trend where marketers/advertisers will use apps like Tweet Scan to search for prospects (suspects)? I’m thinking so. And I’m concerned about the consequences.

I wrote about the increase in Twitter spam the other day, observing that it’s a sign that Twitter has arrived; people now want to use it to blast messages out indiscriminately. There’s never a shortage of marketers who see every new tool as another way to practice interruption marketing, and in doing so, they inevitably make the tool less useful for everybody. People use Twitter to connect with other people, not to get ads, and as the amount of Twitter spam increases, people will pay less attention to everything on it.

Which is not the fault of TweetScan or any other search tool; these tools are great, because they give you a way to find online conversations about your organization or topics related to your business. Everyone should be doing that.

Conversations on Twitter are a mix of social and business. I will sometimes tweet something about my dog; if I know that in the next few days I’ll suddenly be followed by “people” who are actually companies selling dog products, I probably won’t do that; every time someone follows me it generates an email to notify me of that, and the number of spam follows is already getting annoying. (I just block those users.)

There’s really not much an individual who doesn’t want to be bothered by this can do about it. You can protect your tweets so that only your current followers can see them, but if people start doing that, Twitter becomes less useful for all. You can stop getting emails to tell you someone new is following you, but then you lose the opportunity to connect with interesting people you don’t know yet.

Thus far Twitter has been interesting (and compelling to users) because you can explore it, you can see what people are saying about all kinds of things, and discover new people who share your business or personal interests. Spam could kill that pretty quickly.

So what’s the solution? One might be for Twitter itself to start monitoring for obvious spammers; people whose Twitter pages contain no information about human beings, but just link to a Squidoo page or a ton of links. There’s a cost to that, too, of course; once that sort of policing starts, some real users get caught in it (and plenty of spammers don’t).

I wouldn’t mind seeing a line of each Twitter page that tells us - along with how many followers someone has and how many people they’re following - how many people have blocked them. That would be a clue that someone is a bad actor.

But I’m not sure what the answer is, except that I’d hate to see Twitter become like email, where 75% of what comes through to you is garbage.

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