Erstellt am: 8. 2. 2010 - 11:37 Uhr
Today's Webtip: StopTweets
Earlier this morning I followed a link to an article written by a "Social Marketing Consultant" who was advising his readers and colleagues to pull out of Twitter. His opinion was that Twitter was almost as useless as Second Life when it came to marketing, and the media hype alone wasn't enough to make it a valid marketing channel.
That made me very happy. I mentioned the article on Twitter, and noted that it would be nice to have one or two channels of communication that weren't being ruthlessly commercialized (as in being filled with commercials). I realize Twitter might some day have to include advertising, but that is much different than being bombarded by useless links to SEO seminars and Black Hat marketing tools, or meaningless "Did you see this?" links to product pages.
It was only a matter of minutes before the first response from an SEO bot showed up in the form of a link to SEO software. It almost looked as though the account had been hacked, since most of the tweets were fake responses pushing their product, but the profile Bio was for a middle-aged mother who likes sports.
The account was blocked and deleted and I went on with my life. For five minutes.
And then I ran across a link to stoptweet.com
Synchronicity.
StopTweet is meant to help you clean out your friends and followers list. To rid it of the spambots and one track tweeters, or even worse the follow fiends who rack up tens of thousands of followers for no apparent reason. Many of them end up morphing into spammers later.
It's not the most sophisticated of tools, but compared to the solutions offered by twitter out of the box it's literally better than nothing.