I just returned home from the Social Media & Communities 2.0 2011 conference in Boston. The conference featured some amazing speakers representing some amazing brands. In order to make sure I wasn’t the only person learning from the conference I was live tweeting all the sessions I attended so my followers could follow along. While everything at the conference was great, something weird started happening on Twitter. Almost every time I mentioned a big brand’s name, like Best Buy, I would receive a slew of tweets offering me “free” products and gift cards related to the brand I had recently tweeted about.
I’m sure that I’m not the only person that this happens to. Twitter is full of spammers that use key words that you tweet about to target you to click their link so they can capture your email, put some sort of spyware or virus on your computer or worse things. I was astounded at the number of spam tweets I received over the two days that I was at the conference and it made me start to wonder just how much spam was on Twitter?
Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics program, I decided to do a quick search to see what I could come up with and the results nearly blew me away. I decided to search for the terms “free” or “gift card” (since I personally get offered $500 or more gift cards all the time) over the past six months. To help narrow it down to actual spam spam though, I also required the results to include the word “get” or “got”. I did this because of the amount of spam tweets I saw that said something along the lines of “I just got my free ______, you should click this link and get yours too.”
With just those simple search terms our system found 9.4 million tweets over the past six months. Granted, some of those tweets may have been people talking about getting gift cards as presents, but 9.4 million is still a large number.
Just to test my theory of people recieving gift cards as presents, I looked at our popularity graph for the last six months. I expected to see a large rise in people talking about these things around the holiday times near the end of December, but actually found that to be one the times with the least tweets containing my search terms. However, we can see popularity spikes near the beginning of the chart. When I drilled into those spikes I found that people were using Halloween to try and gain peoples’ attention. There was also another spike at the beginning of March and found that people were offering “free” iPad 2’s before they were released to the public.
Next, I pulled up our word cloud to see if I could get a sense of just how these spammers were trying to bait people. We can see that they usually use high profile, high demand, electronic devices such as iPhones, Android devices, BlackBerrys and iPads. We also can see a lot of short URLs in the word cloud, because it wouldn’t really be spam unless they were asking you to click something.
The word cloud reminded me just how many “offers” I have received over my time on Twitter for some of these devices and I decided to do one last search for “free” and “ipad” or “iphone” since those are the spam tweets I receive the most. In the past six months our system was able to find 2.8 million tweets containing those “free” offers. As much as some of us would wish them to be true, there’s probably no way that many free Apple products were given out.
There’s no doubt that there is a lot of spam on Twitter, but there’s also a lot of great content and conversations as well. I’m sure Twitter is doing what they can to help eliminate (or at least cut down on) spam, but people will always find new ways to try and trick users. Until spam can be completely erased from Twitter we’re just going to have to help the fight ourselves, but to be honest, I get great pleasure out of blocking and reporting spammers.
I’m interested to know how people have tried to trick you with spam on Twitter, so leave a comment and let us know how they tried to get you.
Article:http://blog.sysomos.com/
