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Twitter Spam at Large: the TweetJacking Spiel
Note: This piece is the product of a co-operation between Brian Wallace of NowSourcing blog and yours truly. You can follow him on Twitter here. (Oh yes, and his main site is actually here, heh.) It was a fun discussion and I can only recommend following him both on his blog and on Twitter!
Mr. @TweetSpammer (not his real name) comes along and retweets your perfectly valid tweet, but puts in a different link of his own – covering it up with URL shortening.
Welcome to – the TweetJack zone!
Seriously folks…imagine if you will taking a Retweet fest hostage. What if that link was then retweeted by the likes of Guy Kawasaki  (81k followers) one of the best established Twitter linchpins and broadcasters?
Or picture hijacking a tweet from CNN Breaking News (441k followers) – it will still be the same message, but an entirely different landing page.
The mechanics of tweetjacking are dead simple, anyone can do it: select a message to retweet, switch the original link for the one you want to hijack visitors to – then submit.
“Seeing it as a retweet, you’re piggybacking on the original poster’s authority. Not only will people click those links, they’ll also retweet your stuff again and again without ever checking them – this makes it get viral within seconds.”
@TweetSpammer is not a “bad boy,” he’s just interested in using a borrowed ladder to success.
ReTweet Apathy
Want another scary bedtime story? How about the number of people just totally desensitized by retweets, just desperate to retweet anything. This reporter has seen out there a Twitter user that simply asked his following to retweet with no further explanation. The result? Plenty of retweets.
Remember folks… you are what you… tweet.
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[ Keywords: seo spam, social networks, tweetjacking, Twitter ]
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