Kevin Rose Explains How to Spam Twitter and Everybody Loves it
CC: Cut here by Phoney Nickle.
Kevin "cut teats" Rose, not only infamous for his sexist remarks but also as a failed entrepreneur who pownced his microblogging community is also known for his hate of SEO.
In an interview he once explained that it's a "whole industry dedicated to spam". It's no wonder that on Digg, the highly biased social news site some topics, especially SEO are banned.
Many people don't know that and submit my articles over there in spite of me not offering "Digg this" buttons whatsoever and waste their precious time. Successful stories about search engine optimization get buried, no matter how popular they are. Instead I encourage you to submit my posts on Mixx, Social|Median or StumbleUpon where I am a known and respected community member.
The more I was astounded by a recent guest post of the same Kevin Rose on TechCrunch where he not only deals with Twitter SEO but also encourages using Twitter spamming techniques.
Most notably Kevin Rose advocates setting up fake contests to artificially inflate your number of followers. Still, that's not a scandal by itself. It's the overwhelming reaction on Twitter and elsewhere: Everybody loves it!
It just depends on who says it, when an "evil SEO blogger" dares to utter how you can optimize your site it's "SEO spam" but when a poster boy of the geek generation talks crap everybody claps.
This outrageous incident is the more intriguing as Kevin Rose also gives another infamous link baiter and self proclaimed SEO hater Jason "SEO bullshit" Calacanis as a good example for staging fake contest to artificially inflate your number of followers on Twitter.
OK, enough of this blog rage.
Let me explain a few things about Twitter optimization so that you don't fall for bogus "advice" like this.
Who am I to give you Twitter Optimization advice? Do I have 30k followers or something? Now, I have "just" around 550 but that doesn't matter as Twitter optimization is not about having thousands of sheep following you. I use Twitter for a few months and have enough insight by now to write a Twitter optimization series over at SEOptimise.
Twitter optimization is about
- successful social networking
- a tight group of friends and supporters
- reputation and trust by connectors and active users
- contact with real people, real Twitter users
- dialogue not monologue
Unless your name is Barack Obama and you have a whole team of people managing your Twitter account it does not work in a way Cut Teats and SEO Bullshit use it.
A few months ago when I still had around 200 friends and followers Twitter worked much better for me than now. It's like in real life, you can't have a dozen best friends. On Twitter the more "friends" and followers you get the less you communicate with those you have.
So I give you a down to earth Twitter SEO advice:
- Don't try to be a like a fake celebrity.
- Connect with your real friends and like minded people on Twitter and support each other.
- Stop inflating your follower numbers for Christ's sake.
In case you believe what people like Cut Teats and SEO Bullshit say, just listen to the link bait crap they said earlier. Jason Calacanis for instance declared "blogging dead" or his web directory to be "Web 3.0".
Do you really want to be like him and stake a fake contest where people just follow you to get a MacBook or an iPod? This is ridiculous. These guys would kill their own mothers for publicity.
Do you want to be like Kevin Rose who abandoned his company Pownce to support competitor Twitter now? He's a traitor on his staff and his users.
Check out my post on Twitter pros & cons, tools and ways of using it and how it benefits your SEO 2.0! Also check out these resources for Twitter success:
- 5 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter by Dan Zarella
- How Well Do You Use Your Twittersphere? by DazzlinDonna
- How to Set Up a Professional Twitter profile by Shana Albert
- The Top 5 Mistakes Internet Marketers Make on Twitter by Remarkablogger Michael Martine
- Advanced Twittering: 5 Tips for More Effective Tweets by Brian Carter
This was an awesome post, I enjoyed it all the way through.
I think it’s sad how people hang on every word of some of these guys like it’s gospel. Especially when they’re dead wrong.
30M visitors a month and Digg still can’t turn a profit. Yeah, I’d take advice from that guy.
It’s funny when someone that is already popular tries to tell you how to build a following in social media. He didn’t get popular through Twitter, his following was a result of is inextricable popularity to begin with. All he had to do was scribble his twitter address on a napkin and leave it in a bar.
I like your article, you are really right. If you aren t a celebrity why are you trying to inflate your twitter followers? Less is more:)
I can give a rats ass about any of it really. Intriguing post though, I actually read it all the way through and didn’t get bored.
I think this will be a problem for those on the outside looking in to see what’s going on. They’ll see all these salesmen and think they walked onto a used car lot and turn away as more and more people follow and see what the top guys are doing in each realm of the frontier.
If that were true, then Twitter and all these other time consuming sites will be filled with the blather of a million Jerry Maguire’s…
In fact, Twitter really is a ‘help me help you’ type environment. No one is there without some reasonable attempt to help themselves in some manner. Everyone is selling something, and it gets really old after a while.
Where’s the “I just want to piss off” corner? I guess we make it and sit there lonely and bored since we aren’t the “normal” twits.
Although, it’s amazing what is going on, with the Internet still such a stormy sea of waves as it is today.
I’m not trying to be obtuse here, I’m just really bored and feeling a bit negative…
We live and learn everyday in this business. I too am beginning to question a lot of the advice that the so called ‘gurus’ out there throw around. I agree about the Twitter numbers though, what is the point of having followers if there can be no real value put into or achieved from those relationships.
Thanks for a informative and eye-opening post.
[...] many times on Twitter and its been discussed over and over. I am sure there are some users (like Tad Chef) with 200 close followers that are getting the same amount of benefit from using Twitter than some [...]
This was one of my fave cut teats tips:
http://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/1140939979
I mean c’mon – the guy is teaching people how to spam and scam? But, still doesn’t like when it happens to him…
I’ve been annoyed seeing respectable SEO types (not naming names) using Twitter as a spam/marketing platform. Even if it’s working for them, it makes me respect/trust them less.
That is insanely crazy, I’m still wondering what was Kevin Rose thinking? It’s good to know that Digg always does that, no wonder most of my articles got buried on digg but I think currently mixx is not on a big scale like Digg. Looking forward to your series on Twitter optimization!
yeah. All this guy is interested in is spamming people.I get DM’s constantly now with nothing but crap.
I believe that these guys are spamming but I can’t believe that people actually love it or respect it.
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