Are Marketers Ruining Twitter?

There has absolutely been a rapid increase in spam on Twitter lately.

It was a problem beforehand. But, then some celebrities brought more attention to Twitter and, all of a sudden, the rest of the world is catching onto Twitter. And where the people are, marketers follow.

Is it a bad thing? What should be done about it?

Good Versus Bad Marketers

I know there are going to be people who have a knee-jerk reaction to this question by lumping all marketers together. But, that is a mistake.

The smart, savvy marketers realize that Twitter is a SOCIAL site and they use it accordingly. Savvy marketers realize that it is insanely STUPID to do nothing but product pitches on Twitter. It isn’t going to work.

The marketers who I follow understand this. The marketers I follow are NOT the kind of people putting out stuff like “Get 16,000 followers in 30 days”. Instead, they are simply being real people and making connections with their audience. They realize that business takes place OFF Twitter. Twitter is like a big party and you have to treat it as such.

Bad Marketers Make It Suck For Everybody

So, with that delineation established, let me clearly state the way I see it:

1. There are a lot more lazy, BAD marketers online than there are good ones.
2. The bad ones are making Twitter increasingly annoying for everybody.

Bad marketers look at Twitter like fishing. They want to build up a big following, then just keep throwing a bunch of hooks into the pool to see how many idiots they can get to bite. As a result, we get more blatant “make money online” pitches from lazy marketers. We get porn on Twitter. We get the lame auto-DMs with overt sales pitches.

What Can (Or Should) Be Done?

The way I see it, Twitter is going though the same evolution as email did – but on fast forward. Email started out small, then it grew. Then the marketers learned the power of it and it ballooned into a huge spam problem. Then an entire filtering industry sprung up to combat it. Then anti-virus and other protections became necessary.

Twitter is following the standard product development curve, but it is happening faster than we’ve ever seen it.

Like email, nobody is ever going to be able to stop spam on Twitter. It will be a constant fight between spammers, users, and Twitter itself. The one difference I see is that Twitter is a single, central company unlike email. This means that Twitter can employ protections at the core level to combat the problem. This is where we’ll see things like:

1. System-level filtering.
2. Policing of user accounts, with suspensions, bans, etc.

What Twitter has to be careful of is not to get so overly aggressive with this that they harm the platform. And therein lies the crux of the issue. After all, it is the community inviting the problem. People can choose to follow or unfollow anybody they want. It isn’t as if the user is powerless over the situation.

So, I put the question to you, my readers.

What do you think should be done about Twitter spam?