Twitter cracks down on third-party spammers
Twitter is imposing password resets for accounts that bought followers from third-party applications. Besides being against the spirit of grassroots community building, buying followers is often detrimental for the health of subscribing accounts.
Simply typing “get more twitter followers” into a Google search gives a plethora of options – TwitterTrain, BuyTwtterFollowers.com and TwitterFollower.com, to name a few. Typically, they offer 10,000 followers in a few days for $60. What’s the harm in that?
It can kill a brand page. The McCafe Twitter account, no doubt in an attempt to rival the almost 1 million follower strong Starbucks page, signed up for the follower service and experienced a high level of PR damaging spam. The service automatically made McCafe follow other service subscribers, and resulted in a steady level of spam ad Tweets on the account page. Tweets stopped permanently last year after the account holder lost control to the third-party provider.

At the simplest level, third-party follower services violate Twitter’s terms of service. In fact, they specifically note that giving passwords to one of these services will result in a suspended account. But looking more closely at the essence of Twitter in general, the idea of quick-buy followers goes against everything the network is about, and the fact that accounts tend to die out after subscribing is a testament to how Twitter users will respond to desperate brands.

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SMI writes:: Twitter cracks down on third-party spammers http://bit.ly/9rlfMf
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Twitter cracks down on third-party spammers – Twitter is imposing password resets for accounts that bought follower… http://ow.ly/18qnCH
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Why it’s wrong, wrong, wrong to *buy* Twitter followers (by @socialinfluence) http://bit.ly/9rlfMf #socialmedia #Twitter
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Twitter cracks down on third-party spammers http://ow.ly/1qNlQn
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Twitter cracks down on third-party spammers http://ow.ly/1qNlQn (why buying followers doesn’t work)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Twitter cracks down on third-party spammers | SMI http://bit.ly/9nah6Q #twitterfollowers #buyfollowers #spammers
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[...] would recommend “who to follow”. This may prove more effective than third-party “get more Twitter followers” [...]
One thought that I’ve had over the past week is how much of Twitter’s development and new features that they are adding to the website is adding to the ever more frequent “Fail Whale” that we (or atleast I) am seeing more and more?
I’d like to think that if Twitter are going to add this advertising feature as a major part of their platform that they will do something to decrease the amount of times a day that Twitter is “Over-Capacitated” – In the past four days I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen the “Fail Whale” on Twitter 3 times, once a day and I’m almost waiting for it to appear today.
If and when this new advertising platform is used more frequently by big brands across the World I can only hope that the increased weight doesn’t increase the down time of Twitter itself.
Phil Johns
http://www.absorbmedia.co.uk
@absorb_media
This comment was originally posted on socialmediainfluence.com
[...] falls in line with our previous reports on the gimmicky “I-follow-you-you-follow-me on Twitter” services that claim to boost your following but do so by linking you with every undesirable [...]
[...] can’t help but think of the “Twitter Follower Trains” that Twitter so animatedly fought against last year. Third-party services promised users [...]
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