Twitter has gained much publicity over the past few months with celebrities and companies all jumping on the bandwagon. With this increased usage, it was inevitable that spam would find it’s way into this relatively new technology, but how can we ensure we do not get targeted as spam ourselves?

We use Twitter both privately and for Strawberrysoup to publicise what we are doing, sites we have launched and our thoughts for the day. This is all very innocent, but does help to potentially market our business to the wider audience of millions of Twitter users each day. We also manage Twitter accounts for multiple clients who do not have the time to update their Tweets themselves, so get us to do it on their behalf.

We only have 100 or so followers who are generally located near our offices (although we do have some US based follows) but are proud of the followers we have. We recently launched a new website for Irregular Choice which we are very proud of so we decided to publicise it online via our blog, portfolio and Twitter. The latter received some negative feedback from fellow Twitter users thinking we were spammers, so here are our top tips for effective ‘tweeting’ on Twitter:

  1. Build relationships with users, don’t just send them random marketing spiel
  2. Limit the number of your Tweets per hour – don’t overdo it
  3. Don’t send the same Tweet to multiple Twitter users, even if they are your friends
  4. Only send out 1 update on a certain subject (such as the launch of a new website!)
  5. Public reply to people you are following
  6. Remember that all Tweets (even your deleted ones) can still be seen online
  7. DO NOT SPAM

If people are interested in what you have to say, they will find you (thanks @joshr). Otherwise do not try and push it too much into the faces of Twitter users – it will have the opposite effect and will annoy your current followers.

If you use Twitter and think that someone is spamming, you can automatically report them to Twitter by RT’ing their tweet and sending it to @spam – this will get picked up and investigated if necessary.