The Busy Brain Twitter Debacle
Did you get a bunch of followers on the 20th? Wonder where your new twitter followers came from? Thank The Busy Brain.
The story begins for me when I posted my Twitter Grade. Then last Sunday (Oct 19th, 12:45AM), I get the following email in my twitter filter in Gmail, TheBusyBrain is now following you on Twitter! I check him out, profile looks good, friends are pretty even, I think nothing of it. I follow him back.
The next day(Oct 20th) it hits the fan. I get around 40 new follow requests on twitter in one day. Most of them are very spammy accounts and all mostly fresh meat looking noobs. I was wondering what the hell was going on and I caught a tweet linking to my new Pal, The Busy Brain's Blog and I quickly figured out where the twitter noobs were coming from.
The Busy Brain spent some time and figured out how to game the twitter system a bit. He found some Tweople that some might be considered "Twitterati", people that are active on twitter, that read their email alerts and have a high chance of following back. So he did do some homework on his little Social Media Optimization Experiment.
The Busy Brain failed in at least two ways with his Social Media Optimization Experiment. First he didn't let the victims know what they were in for. If you are going to have a Social Media Love in, it is only fair that everyone knows they are going to be participating in the Social Media Love in. Secondly the space monkeys he got were all random people in addition to being noobs on twitter and a few of them were down right spammy. The idea behind Social Media Marketing (SMM) is to NOT be spammy, your goal should be to engage people that want to hear about your brand, your products or your ideas. The goal should be to get people to follow you for your content or insight.
The Busy Brain ended up seeing the error of his ways in less than a day and apologized. Next time you get followed on twitter, maybe you should sleep on it instead of following back right away. Now I have some extra pruning to do on my twitter list this week.
The Busy Brain Twitter Debacle
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Twitterati
5 comments:
Hey Dean
Thanks for the shout on Digg. Yep I was one that got caught up in the 'Love In', although I must admit that I had the opportunity and good fortune to find many great sites/people that I did not know existed.
In one small way perhaps BB can be thanked for stimulating new business activity for some of these folk as I certainly have given my business to them and are now using their services.
Keep it comin
Cheers
Viv10
Ah, that explains a great deal. Great example of what NOT to do. I just keep advising people to just be natural in social media...join networks, friend people who share your interests, chat and network, have a good time. But doing it the organic way is just too slow for some people.
Gonna reblog you in a bit.
Good tip-I agree with Viv in that you've managed to turn a negative situation in a positive way to still give BB a bit of a boost. Thanks for the advise.
Good post. I was one if the people already on his follow list wondering why I was so popular all of a sudden. BusyBrain just doesn't understand that Twitter is about being social to connect, not "buying lists".
I wondered where that burst of Tweeters came from. I use the Qwitter site, which emails me when someone stops following me. I wait a few days after someone adds me... usually the spammers stop following a day later, to keep their numbers down or something.
~ Kristi
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