The other is the Twitter spam that we see so much of. On the one hand I hate having to sort through the mindless follower requests. Yesterday I replied to a fellow who’d shared a link to a James Randi video explaining why homeopathy doesn’t work. Now I’m getting requests from various new age advocates even though I’m in the skeptic camp. Obviously they auto-followed on a key word not knowing that the context shows I’m not in their target market.

As a marketer my concern is that these people just don’t get how to use Twitter as a social media marketing tool, and the by-product of their ignorance is the spam requests we get each day.

Some may be making some coin, as there always will be a few gullible folks willing to risk their cash.

But mostly I think there is a sub network in Twitter composed of all of these auto-follower types. A, B and C all start using auto-follow services. Then everyone using the services ends up following each other. Now they all have follower lists of 50,000 or more. They are each publishing their get rich schemes, inspirational quotes, blog entries etc. out to this legion of followers. But as we’ve seen they rarely reply or retweet. Many are auto-posting, so they probably aren’t even reading their followers Tweets. Thus we have a bunch of people shouting into the wind – at each other – while no one is actually paying attention.

Imagine if you were standing on the field of a football stadium full of people. You hold up a giant sign with your message. This is a great opportunity, you have the chance to put your message in front of all these people. You’re so giddy with excitement that you close your eyes and dream of gold while proudly holding your sign in the air.

What you don’t notice is that everyone in the stands is also holding a sign. And they’re all standing with their back to the field, so no one is reading your sign and no one is reading theirs.

Actually this wouldn’t bother me in the least if they stuck to themselves. But as happened with you and quickcashmaker, they try to follow the rest of us too. So each day we get poked by people asking us to look at their sign and we have to look at these requests, saying no, no, no, until we find that one follower request from a real person who actually wants to converse.

sigh.
New from Heidi Cool: Your Flash site won’t seem so cool if visitors can’t use it.

Historical twit revenue, Who knows?