If Twitter is Turning to Spam Should We Call it Spatter?

I’ve been running an experiment with Twitter recently and I’m not sure I like what I’m getting.

Over the last few weeks or so, I’ve tried “tweetlater” and “socialtoo” to autofollow the people who have been following me. I did this only after doing everything manually for over six months. I take my Twitter seriously. That means that I’m not just following people because they are following me. I’m following people because I truly value what they have to share on Twitter. I carefully crafted my community mix to include people from whom I can learn something valuable and build valuable relationships.

But then, I read a post by Guy Kawasaki that outlined how to get more followers on Twitter and I decided to go through that list and try some things I had not tried before. I already had done “Tweetlater” and then I got onto Social Too. And that made my follower list grow for sure. But then I noticed something else.

A lot of other people were doing the same thing and I was getting these (and sending these) souless impersonal “Thanks for following me” messages to people I had not had time to check out. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I felt like I didn’t have that “close” of a relationship or connection to my community any more. There was a difference – and the difference was that I was literally Instant Messaging to a “LIST” and a list is not a community.

Take a look at this screenshot of some Direct Messages I received.

You can see that some of them include a link where I can “get to know them better.” Now – I actually like that. I don’t always click on it – but I do like to learn more about the people that I Twitter with.

Some people also send links to a tool or a report or something like that. That’s fine too. If it’s useful to me.

Some people send me a link to a page where they want me to buy something. I think that crosses the line. Although if they are in my target area of interest – I get torn.

Then there are the people who are totally peddling on Twitter. That just pisses me off. I feel like it’s degrading the entire purpose of this wonderful application. I’m seeing a lot of that and it’s changing my interaction with Twitter.

As of this morning. I’m going to turn off Tweetlater for Strategy Stew. I don’t want to spam anyone and I’m going to go follow people manually – just like I did before.

What are your thoughts on this?

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