When tweets become spam

‘… following @guykawasaki suggestion repeat tweets …’ — Paulo Coelho, twitter

One metric which may increase our ranking on twitter is the number of tweets we produce, ie the amount of traffic we generate. The temptation therefore is to increase the number of tweets in a crude attempt to bolster our twitter ranking. A temptation to be resisted. Were we to do so we would reduce the signal-to-noise ratio, reduce the value, and worse could be seen as generating spam.

https://keithpp.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/can-we-rank-twitter-streams/

Guy Kawasaki has advised that we repeat our tweets. Were we to follow his advice and repeat every tweet, we would half the information content, decrease the signal-to-noise ratio, reduce the value and worse would quite correctly be seen as generating spam.

http://holykaw.alltop.com/the-art-of-the-repeat-tweet

Repeating tweets should not be confused with re-tweeting, which is to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio and demonstrates our tweets have merit.

I have had followers where every alternate tweet is a repetition of the same tweet, worse, a stream that consists of a repeat of the same tweet! In the past I blocked these followers, now I block and report as spam. So be warned!

A reminder is ok, as is sending a tweet to multiple recipients, anything else is spam.

Special thanks to Paul Coelho, whose tweet of yesterday on following the advice of Guy Kawasaki to repeat tweets gave me the germ of an idea.

See

Can we rank twitter streams?

The art of the repeat tweet