Am I Encouraging Twitter Spam?

Since my last post about getting free traffic from Twitter, I’ve gotten a couple emails from concerned readers who believe I’m encouraging Twitter spam.

It’s a fair argument, so I thought I’d address it head on. Here’s the first email I received.

Hi Ryan,

Are these random @ messages sent to non-followers with a sales page at the end? Because if that’s what you are promoting, you’re likely to have people reporting you for spam left and right.

Twitter users are into social media – SOCIAL. Spamming links is not social. It is anti-social.

Know what I mean?

The second email I received was from Joel Comm, a well-known Internet marketer and the author of Twitter Power:

Hey Ryan,

I’m really surprised to see you promoting Twitter Diving.

It’s total and complete Twitter spamming. You have to set up multiple Twitter accounts, and Markus even says on his forum that Twitter is shutting down accounts that are using this tool. You would never risk your own account as it would get shut down.

I’m trying to figure out your motivation…

Eager to hear your reply. :-)

Joel

So the big question is, am I encouraging Twitter spam?

This is a question I asked myself. In fact, I was an original beta tester for Twitter Diving. Naturally, I was concerned about the whole spam issue. So I created a throwaway account to test the service and satisfy my concerns.

After testing Twitter Diving myself, I personally feel my recommendation is not encouraging spam. Here’s why I say that…

Let’s say you’re on Twitter and you come across a tweet about “quinoa.” You’ve recently written an article about quinoa, so you reply back and say something like, “Hey, I see you’ve got an interest in quinoa. You might like this article: [link]”

Is this spam?

No.

You’re providing useful and relevant information based on what a person is publicly talking about.

lets you send personalized @replies to multiple people at once. This is why I view it as a productivity tool. Instead of replying to 10 people by hand, you can reply to those same 10 people all at the same time.

I have already sent lots of @replies by hand, many with links to articles that aren’t selling anything. I’ve received many @replies like this as well. I don’t view it as spam and I don’t think others view it that way either.

To me, it’s similar to somebody on Google searching for something specific and you say, “Hey, here’s what you’re looking for.” Except on Twitter, people are publicly talking about certain subjects and you can jump in and add to that conversation: “Oh, you’re talking about quinoa? Here’s an article you might like…”

Since I began using the tool, I’ve gotten extremely high click-thru rates, usually between 30-50% and sometimes higher. I’ve had some people retweet my @replies. And I’ve also had people reply back to thank me for the information I sent.

If I was spamming people, would they be clicking on my links, retweeting them, and personally thanking me? Probably not.

Obviously, Twitter Diving is like sending email; it can be abused. Somebody could blast out a bunch of irrelevant tweets all pointing to sales pages — but that would defeat the purpose of personalized @replies.

Not to mention, it would quickly backfire. (This is why Twitter Diving has a few safeguards built in to stop anybody who tries to use the tool for spamming purposes.)

Certainly, some will still see in black and white terms and say that all automated tweets are spam.

Of course, if this is their position, then that means that many popular Twitter clients (like HootSuite) are tools for spamming Twitter. It also means all scheduled tweets are spam, all tweets auto-published via an RSS feed are spam, etc.

In the end, I guess it depends on a person’s definition of spam. Sending out unsolicited sales pitches is spam. Sending out on-topic @replies that aren’t trying to sell anything seems to make good sense to me. It’s something I’ve done by hand and will continue to do.

The only difference is that now I’m experimenting with Twitter Diving to be more productive.

This is all just my opinion, of course. I’m certainly open to hearing other arguments. I’ve been wrong before about a lot of different things in my life and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be wrong again!

What’s your perspective? Is sending personalized @replies with spam? Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thanks!

-Ryan M. Healy