Twitter is great. It seems as if no one has even a bad thing to say about it. However, all that glitters is not gold (as the saying goes). While everyone has been all a-twitter, I have noticed that lately, the spam that I have been receiving from Twitter has been nothing short of maddening. There I was, excited that I was finally starting to average more followers the organic way (yes, there are sites out there that will promise you paid followers), only to realize that they were spamming me. What do I mean by “spamming”? You can tell who is a Twitter spammer based on the type of profile that they have. Spammers typically don't have profile pictures at all and only have one or two posts on their Twitter profile. Additionally, you will almost always notice that they typically be following at least 1,000 people despite the fact that hardly anyone is following them back.

In the beginning, hardly one person even knew what Twitter was. It certainly didn't have the popularity or the following (no pun intended) back then that it does now. However, over time, Twitter caught on and then suddenly, it blew up over night. Things seemed to be going along fine until the spammers caught wind of it. So, what can you do once you realize that you're being spammed? For me, personally being the person that I am, I always make it a point to physically check each person's profile before I even consider adding them. The sorts of things that I will look at are the volume of the tweets that they are putting out there in conjunction with the frequency of the tweets (I.e. are they tweeting ever two hours or every two weeks?) as well as the quality of the tweets. For example, if I examine some of their tweets and see that it is nothing but marketing, then I won't add them. For me, someone who wants me to follow them back on Twitter absolutely needs to be adding value to the conversations that I am interested in, or they have to provide information for things that I am interested in. So, I checked through some of the profiles of these people and realized that more than half of them were spammers. But how did I know that they were spammers?

It is unfortunate that there are people out there who would love nothing more than to see Twitter turn into spam central, and for a few days, I considered whether or not I should just get rid of my Twitter account all together. However, after speaking to a few of my “Twitter friends,” I decided not to let the spammers get the best of me. Other than the occasional spammer, Twitter, is for the most part, a reliable service. Because of its growing popularity though, you will sometimes get messages when you log in that Twitter is “over capacity” which simply means that too many people are trying to use it at once. While this is seen as another sort of downside, I am sure that over time, Twitter will get a hold of this and improve it so that people can use it without problems.