Twitter And Spam: The Follow Friday Manifesto
I has been invited by Kay Ballard aka @KayBallard to join The Follow Friday Manifesto recording a podcast about an experiment that i made in order to verify if Follow Friday effectively increase the followers number.
You can check my funny italian slang here (I’m @ikaronet)
About the Manifesto, i report an important point from the official page;
Many people on twitter want to add social media consulting or claims of social media expertise to their little bag of tricks. This is quite prevalent now. Indeed there seems to be a wave of people seeing social media consultancy as something they can just breeze into and use to make money from naive clients.
This ruse is assisted by the fact that it is difficult to prove social media expertise, but rather easy to claim it. One obvious way to lay claim to twitter expertise is to amass a large number of friends and followers. Another is to seek high rankings in the various twitter ranking systems or on twitter leaderboards.
These systems and leaderboards reward twitter account holders with increased scores for certain supposedly valued twitter behaviour. Generosity scores are based partly on the number of retweets that one tweets. Frequent publishing of the @names of others is considered generous as well. It is not hard to realize that retweeting a string of @name recommendations is a generosity ranking bonanza—a huge payoff in just one tweet…
The point is: is FollowFriday spam?
First of all i wanted to verify if it works: i sent 15 twits via Twitter with users recomendations. In 10 minutes i loose 10 followers and i got 4 new ones. So, it seems that i loose just 6 followers but the matter is about quality, not numbers. So, my little experience says that Follow Friday does not work.
I loose followers who was really interested in resource sharing because of the noise that i generated with my twits, and i got 4 followers that probably will never interact with me. People follow people using follow friday just to increase their followers number and cheat the game.
To be fair i have to say that not everybody act in this way, but most users do. This concept is expressed perfectly into the Manifesto.
Another important point is that the problem is not ethical, but pretty practical. I have “just” 400 followers and on friday it’s almost impossible to follow the twits because of FFriday.
How can i read the suggestions of my followers if there are hundreds of nickname running on the timeline each 10 minutes? It’s noise hiding signal.
But also i believe that it’s people who create situations. There nothing bad or good, is the way we act that make something bad or good.
So, there is no rule to follow. We just have to act on ourselves to change the way we interact with others.
This Manifesto could be a good start point to seed a conversation in order to discover the best way to interact between ourselves…
What do you think about it? Did you ever use Follow Friday to increase your followers number? Tell us something about your experience.
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by Dan Di Gregorio | 10 July 2009 | Featured, Social network
Tags | followfriday, marketing online, microblogging, spam, twitter
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