Ylliks

Twitter is one of the most popular and largest growing social networks in the world. It’s also the one I enjoy most, seeing what friends and others are up to, discover new or interesting things and share the links I find share-worthy. It presents an opportunity for brands and individuals to create a social presence and interact with followers, customers or prospects. But in order to do so you will need to make sure people know you’re there. You can do this by sharing great content and through word of mouth, RT’s and Follow Fridays grow your following. This tactic takes time and not all are willing to wait. This has lead to some questionable tactics.

The latest one I’ve seen was one I received at the beginning of this week. I received a mention from an account (it has since been removed for spam) which stated I should follow another account because it tweeted about one of my interests. When I looked at the mentioned account, there was not even a single tweet about that particular interest in the first 20 tweets I read. Then I took a look at the account that mentioned me and saw that all tweets were drafted the same:

@mentionedno.1, @mentionedno.2, @mentionedno.3, @mentionedno.4 : interested in travel? Follow @accountyouneedtofollow for the greatest travel tweets

The practice as I see it is pretty simple: go to one of the most popular twitter accounts and sent every one of their followers a message like above from a bot-account that mentions your account.

What I found most curious about it all is that the bot account had more than a thousand followers. Sure, this could be bots following each other, but I’m sure there were some that just followed the account for being mentioned. Maybe it’s me that takes a look first before following anyone, but what’s the value in following a bot account?

This is just one of the more innocent tactics to get more followers and unfortunately there are more that are more questionable. In order for Twitter to keep their users they should make dealing with spammers one of their top priority. Luckily Twitter has practices in place for removing spam-accounts in order to keep the experience as genuine and enjoyable as possible.

Due to the great Askimet plugin most of the spam I get on this blog (I’m guessing it catches about 99% of it; the odd one gets through) never gets displayed. Usually I don’t care much about those spam comments; I’ll scroll through them every once in a while to see if something that isn’t spam got caught (this happened maybe once in all the years I’ve run a WordPress blog) and if that’s not the case I’ll delete them. That’s about it. When I did the same a couple of weeks ago I noticed something strange: this post gets by far the most spamming comments.

Because I was a bit curious about this, I did a little bit of research. Over the last 3 weeks I got 328 spam comments. 204 of them (62%) were on the aforementioned post. I think that’s a lot for a small post that consists of just 35 words. I’m guessing (and I’m in no way a SEO-guru) this is because it has the word puppies in it (because, let’s be honest, who doesn’t like puppies? (Well, maybe not this guy)) which according to a keyword tool gets about 5 million searches each month. I can understand that if you’re a spammer you want to put your “message” into a post or article that has keywords in it that have a high search rate. But why do it on a small personal blog like my own which, let’s be honest here, is not one of the high flying ones out there?

Spammers probably have a whole lot of their activities automated and probably aren’t even aware where their comments are posted, nor do they care as long as some of their links are clicked and they get paid. Here’s hoping you won’t have to encounter one of those links as long as you visit this blog.

As I’ve mentioned before I already have a Facebook account, but I hadn’t been using it at all until recently. I couldn’t see the appeal of it. But in order to see some of the holiday pictures a friend of mine made, I had to befriend her. This lead to a couple of friend requests from people who know the both of us and that started the ball rolling and I looked into it more. And the thing is, I start to get the appeal of it.

First thing of course is the fact that it’s fun to know what your friends or just people you know are up to and what they find interesting enough to share (which I believe tells you more about a person than anything else). Then there’s the change to reconnect with people you fell a bit out of touch with, because despite the reasons on why that happened, it’s just sending a little friend request to get in touch again.

Then there’s the tech possibilities where you can use a whole lot of applications which makes the experience (I have to rely on what others told me on this) even more worth while. Also it integrates with the application I use for my Twitter account which, in theory, would make it easier for me to work with it.

The biggest drawback on starting to use Facebook on a regular basis is that it’s another potential big time waster. Even though I haven’t used it alot since getting those friends request, you quickly lose time by checking what people are up to and seeing what kind of fun things you can do. And that’s time you could use for doing other (maybe more useful) stuff.

I’m still on the limb when it comes to Facebook and haven’t decided yet if I’ll jump in full time. I do believe I can get some value out of it and understand the appeal, but I also think it can be a huge time waster. I’m planning to talk to some people who use it on a daily basis (for instance Graham is running sort of an experiment on it) and see if they get certain things out of it which I missed (which could be the case since I haven’t really gave it a shot). And I’m sure I’ll be checking out some things as well myself. But as said, I’m still not convinced to give it a real try.

To be honest though: I am intrigued by it.

LinkedIn. Flickr. Twitter. StumbleUpon. Google Reader. As you can see in my blogroll, those are the 5 social media sites that I use (well, I do have a Facebook account, but it’s dormant). When you’re a business and you want me to buy or buy again from you, there’s a good change you can reach me there. For a business the possibilities to choose from are almost endless. And your choice depends on what kind of business you run.

Let’s say your a musician. Before yesterday Myspace Music was the best choice. Sure, they may have lost the battle with Facebook when it comes to total users, but when playing music was your job, they were a safe bet. But with the addition of Ping by Apple, which is tightly integrated with their iTunes business, you might want to jump into that as well. When you’re a multi-national having a presence on Facebook is never a bad idea. But what do you do with your customers in Brazil (where Orkut is the largest) or the Netherlands (where Hyves has the biggest presence)?

And it’s not just the number of social network/media sites you can choose from, it’s also a matter of whether your actions lead to generating leads or sales. Just getting into social media because “everybody is doing it” is not a sound business strategy. You want to reap the benefits of your efforts. So it’s no surprise that consultancy in social media is growing as a business.

Most businesses have realized that they should have a social presence but don’t know how to go about it. And with the ever growing aditions in social media, making the right decision isn’t getting any easier.