The Thin Line Between Social Media Marketing and Spam

ou can share. You can publish. You can broadcast. You can spam.

Today, communication is more accessible than ever before. Anyone with an internet connection can email or Tweet.

With more people publishing and more competition for our attention, free and easy-to-use communication channels lead to spam. Even well-intentioned individuals, marketers and publishers can fall into the spam trap.

Twitter Mention Spam

You have probably seen the spam on Twitter promoting iPhones, gift cards and similar. It’s easy to dismiss these poorly written tweets from accounts that will likely soon be removed.

However, when someone replies to you on Twitter, says “must read, check it out” and the topic is clearly the kind of thing you read and share, you expect it to be a genuine recommendation.

Enter the opportunity for spam.

In this case, a Twitter search showed there were 44 Tweets of an advertising agency’s post in the prior week. 43 of them were copy-paste replies from the same employee of the agency (a “strategist” no less!) sent to 43 people.

One presumably well-intentioned individual spammed influential individuals and organizations in B2B marketing, from BtoB Magazine (@btobmagazine) to Jonathon Block (@jblock) to Steve Farnsworth (@steveology). Some of them multiple times!

Takeaway

Are you engaged in social media enough to recognize spam when you see it? If not, how do you know you are not spamming?

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