Are You Being Spammed? I was!

Spam, aren’t you just sick of it? I post a lot on Twitter, well more then some and less then others I guess. Yesterday I noticed in my email that all of a sudden I had a rash of followers coming on board.

I also like to re-tweet for others when their topic is helpful or interesting, and it brings more attention to them. I’ve noticed the more I do this the more followers I generally pick up. That’s great as on Twitter I personally like an array of knowledge coming through my feed. I don’t necessarily try to pin it down to my niche market. Some may think that is good and some may thing it is bad; it’s just the way I personally like it.

Anyway, due to this rash of followers I seemed to get yesterday I went into my account and check out those who had followed. To my surprise all but 1 were spammers – and not nice ones to say the least. I guess I was surprised as this was the first time I received so many of these at one time. Needless to say, I had a great time blocking them and hitting spam on them. (There is usually a way on most of the reputable social sites to notify the network that it is spam and/or delete or block them.)

This prompted me to go into Twitter’s advanced search and enter some criteria which included re-tweets along with a main search word of Google. I now see how easy it is for spammers to pick new targets and something tells me that they may have software that actually automates it for them (though that’s just a guess on my part).

The reason I’m pointing all this out is so that no matter what account you have, when someone friends you, follows you, or whatever that site wants to call it – please click on their name and check them out. Most all of the social networks allow you to, at the very least, see their profiles and current activity. See if they appear to be a real person that you want following you, because remember, (generally speaking) when you post on your feed it shows up on theirs. Choose wisely where you want your tweets and comments to show up.

Also, as just a little helpful hint, if you have a Google Account and haven’t changed your password lately – do so now. They have issues that come and go too!

If you have any questions with your accounts being spammed, give me a yell!