Twitter Spam

So I've been noticing recently an increase in the number of spam accounts adding me on twitter. I won't link the accounts here, mostly out of a desire not to give them any google juice. These accounts are generally, obviously spam (all posts are related to stocks, "that certain part of the male body", selling die cast cars, etc, etc) and link to some product or service. Some twitter spam-y accounts I do subscribe to (The twitupdates account springs to mind), because I find value in them, it's providing a service I like so it's more bacon like then spam.

All that is fine; I have always held that twitter is a pretty spam resistant platform, because I don't have to follow folks who aren't providing content I want. You see this a lot with the spam account Although an interesting thing happened today that rather annoyed me. Someone new followed me. I did my standard due diligence. Take a look at the content of his tweets which looked at least mildly interesting. His follower to followee ratio was way out of whack but I decided to give him a follow back. The first thing he DMs me a few mins after the follow is:

Thanks for the follow. Are you a registered user on <the site he works for>?

Now, I have no problem with self promotion on twitter, I tweet every one my blog posts for example, but I also provide a lot of content as well.so I feel that it's all OK (as long as I don't have malfunctions like the other night). But the there's something rather spammy about plugging your site via a direct message, especially in your first contact. I think it's only been once or twice that I've ever send someone a link via DM and in those cases it was in the middle of a conversation where the story would be used to illustrate a point.

I was able to stop following that person to prevent future spams which goes back to my point about things like auctioning off twitter accounts. Twitter is good for exactly one spam. Once you lose that trust you people stop following you, period.