Guy Kawasaki: Twitter spamming works | Hacker News Reader

Guy Kawasaki: Twitter spamming works

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24 pointshenning23 comments

Yes, being a dick spammer works, for a given definition of "works". I unfollowed Guy Kawasaki a very long time ago, and I'm pretty sure most people who care about their keeping their tweet-stream interesting have, too.

What's a "dick spammer"? A spammer solely dedicated to p3ni1s enlargement?

A lot of people don't use Twitter the way you do. If you follow two thousand people including Guy you might never notice that he is repeating tweets. What's wrong with optimizing for those people? You are free to not follow.

I follow 600 people, but I still notice spammy people. I followed Guy Kawasaki for a short while, but soon decided that he wasn't worth following.

It's interesting to read Guy talk about Twitter. Twitter's pretty new, and still pretty lawless, so you still get a lot of people really openly discussing how best to use Twitter to do nothing more than advertise, to self-promote, or to keep the great handjob circle that is the Social Media and SEO Community.

Whereas, in most media, this kind of mercenary, soulless, absolutely content-free (how to change the world? What are you adding to the world, besides a lot more plugs for bullshit people don't need—much of it so worthless that it's only about how to do further advertising on twitter!) discussion and broadcasting would be called spam, or junk, or commercial hackery, we seemingly haven't matured to that point yet on the web. As far as I can tell, some of us have really bought the idea that our ruling class—that is, soi-disant 'SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERTS'—should be composed of those people who actually have the least to say. They are Social Media Experts because all they blog or twitter about is blogging and twittering. And why is that? Because their interest, indeed their avocation, is in the medium itself: how to advertise, how to worm their way into people's attention. If they had some field of interest or expertise that they wanted to excel in, they would use their online presences to communicate about it. But they don't; so instead they blog about twittering, and vice versa.

Anyway, what's interesting is that this is all above-board and approved of. I can only imagine that the fact that these folks have such an avid fanbase, seemingly enthralled by their newest bloviation on how to 'add value' are really only hanging on because they would like some day to be doing the same thing. Some day, maybe, there will be a Webcock News in addition to a Hacker News, people will catch on to the pernicious effect that these people have, and they will lose their inexplicable prestige.

Oh, you know what: I just realized the other reason that Guy still has so many hip, social media plebs debasing themselves in his direction: he's got the money! I should become a Venture Capitalist; then I could find out if hackers give good blowjobs.

No surprises here. The loudest, most self-sure people tend to be looked to as the leaders.

It's like on LOST. Jack sounds like he knows what he's doing, so they put him in charge. Meanwhile, Sayid, the quiet hacker, is always right.

A few months ago, I create 2 Twitter feeds: http://twitter.com/applelinks and http://twitter.com/applestuff

Each of these based on an RSS mix of the same 8 or so Apple-centered websites.

@applelinks tries to filter them for quality, by posting only links that appear in more than one feed or link from one feed to another. Also, it runs the URLs past delicious.com to add a few relevant #tags.

@applestuff does none of that. It just posts every item that appears in every feed, prefixed each with the same #apple tag.

Both of these started on the very same day. None of them was promoted etc. Current results: 229 subscriber for @applestuff, 66 subscribers for @applelinks.

Interesting.

But maybe - thats not a spam / poor quality issue. Maybe thats a higher quantity = higher frequency on search.twitter.com issue which is leading to more followers.

Absolutely. The thing is, if the system rewards frequent posting, by definition this harms the average post quality.

(In fairness, I think the same is true for blogs etc. I used to think RSS readers could fix this, but Twitter is basically an RSS reader - you don't have to visit someone's page to see their new tweets - yet it's at least as spam-rewarding)

Automated RSS aggregator Twitter bots are boring and annoying. I never follow them.

I know, that's why I was surprised to get 229 followers on that bot :)

229 other bots autofollowing whenever the apple keyword gets mentioned.

Not unlikely..

It looks like a lot of the followers of each are spam accounts. They are probably bots that follow anyone who searches for a certain topic.

For some reason @applelinks creates its own bit.ly links while @applestuff re-uses them, so unfortunately we can't use clicks to see if either feed is read more by real people.

"Did I enrage or even lose followers because of this blatant, mind-numbing, repeated promotions? Truthfully, it’s tough to tell because several hundred people/bots unfollow me every day. Each day I did get two to three complaints from people who threatened to unfollow me for doing this. I offered them the choice of paying to read my tweets if I didn’t repeat or promote anything, but I’ve had no takers so far."

I'm wondering if maybe the lack of takers was because his suggestion isn't doable that no one bothered to respond. It does make you wonder if someone could sell access to their tweets. 'Pay me X amount, I'll approve you to see my private account'.

What's "spam" about this? It's his Twitter feed. He can do what he wants with it, as long as he isn't @msging me.

"Spam" as a verb can connote unsolicited commercial messages, especially email, but in a broader sense is often used to mean aggressive, repeated broadcasting or emission of some kind, generally less malicious than actual traditional email spam.

E.g., "I was spamming grenades in Quake like nobody's business." to mean that you were rapidly, indiscriminately shooting grenades in the hope of blanketing an area with grenade explosions in order to score an easy kill.

In that sense, sending the same Twitter message over and over seems like typical spammy behavior. The marketing/commercial focus of it is also somewhat similar to a spammer, since spam is done for profit.

Finally, technically when a spammer makes fake accounts full of affiliate marketing links and the like and then follows everyone he can find, that's him doing what he wants (spamming) with his Twitter feed as well. Many of them still don't @message people yet.

meh, following a spammer account is like replying to a viagra email. It's easy to prune your twitter account if you don't like to receive unsolicited tweets. You can also make your account private if you don't want people following you or reading your tweets.

He's not broadcasting. You have to subscribe to him to see the messages.

Do other people spam Twitter? Can Twitter be spammed? Is Twitter spam annoying? Should those people be hunted down and ejected from Twitter? Of course. What does that have to do with posting repeated useless things to your own Twitter stream?

Sorry, but the actual headline is "How to Drive Traffic with Repeat Tweets". When you disagree with an author at least try to be honest and don't use a misleading headline for HN.

You can voice your disagreement in the comment section.

I don't know why this got downmodded. It's a good point. Headlines should not be editorialised like that, in general.

In this specific case, I agree with the new headline, but then I agreed with the topic too, so I'm probably biased.

There is nothing wrong with repeating your tweets, especially for different time zones, once for Australia, once India, once UK/Europe/South Africa, once India and once the US (or twice for both East and West Coast).

Personally I have followers throughout the world but seldom manage to tweet stuff more than once but this way you not only don't reach all of them but basically discriminate against some of them.

I follow Guy Kawasaki and I'm quite happy with it. I haven't noticed repetitive tweets at all.

You should follow him too along with Seth Godin: http://twitter.com/guykawasaki

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