stormbrew

Spammers on Twitter appear to have discovered how to use @replies to their advantage. For the twitter uninitiated, an @reply is essentially a public message. Prefixing a message with @username makes it so the target user sees the tweet in a special reply feed even if they aren’t following them, but it also allows everyone else to see it if they’re following both people or look specifically at the sender’s account.

Most spam on Twitter takes the form of someone who has 1-3 tweets following you, the idea being that you’ll look at their profile, find one of their tweets interesting, and click on one of them. Likely you’ll be taken to something completely different, but I don’t know because I don’t click on them.

(Note: You can easily tell a spammer since they usually have a username in the format FirstLast1234. Everyone knows real people don’t tack numbers on the end if they can’t find their username anymore. Except spammers I suppose)

Anyways, it’s interesting to look at the account I linked to in the first paragraph, because it offers a rare glimpse into the success rate of Twitter spam. We can tell that this user has sent out approximately 8,814 @replies about Lavalife to a presumably random selection of people. By tacking /info/ into his bit.ly link, we can also look at the Bit.ly info page for his link to see how many hits he’s gotten over the course of his ‘campaign’.

What we come up with is that 370 people apparently clicked on his link. Out of 8814. A clickthrough rate of a whopping 4%. That might not sound very high, but it’s not unheard of for banners to have clickthrough rates below 1%. I hate to say it, but it seems part of the reason Twitter spam is so successful might be because it actually works. I was really hoping for a different result here.

Though maybe this really just says something terrible about the banner industry, that it can’t even promote its clients as successfully as twitter spam.