A truly wonderful part of any user-generated social community is the Jupiter-sized amount of spam that kamikazes towards the site like John Daly to the pro club bar.
Twitter, a social messaging site, is not immune. That won’t shock anyone in the social media know, but I gained a new appreciation for the spam-friendliness of Twitter when nerkaszs followed me.
This is a person with 27 updates, each of which follows the exact same format: “I just updated my Squidoo page: [ link to page ].”
This is obviously a borderline spam account, with no real personal info or valuable knowledge transfer on any particularly discernible topic. This is purely and simply an SEO play on Squidoo lenses that nerkaszs has built and presumably collects some PPC income on.
So why would anyone follow this account? Anyone who takes 5 seconds to actually look at it will drop it faster than a bar of soap on a string in a prison shower.
The answer is the secret to Twitter’s Spamability Quotient: 39%. Many Twitter users automatically follow anyone who follows them. There are a variety of ways, including this one that Dave Taylor explains.
I’m guessing the TSQ is about 39% … based simply on nerkaszs‘s stats. Whoever Nerk is, she/he/it follows (yeah right) 918 people and has suckered 360 people into following (repeat yeah right) him/her/it. Do the math and you’ve got 39% of all people who are followed who will automatically reciprocate.
And that number says interesting things about spammers’ ability to use Twitter as a reproducible loudspeaker.
Despite the severe temptation, I will NOT be checking out this nerkasz’s Twitter or Squidoo page. Nor will I place my tongue against a frozen lamp standard.
But it is tempting…..