Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Today’s topic: The vanishing value of retweets due to the attack of the Twitter bots.
The sheer number of retweets has become more and more pointless recently.
That’s a sad realization but it’s true. You can get dozens of retweets just by more or less automated Twitter accounts. That’s of course just half of the problem. Not only the metric “number of retweets” is worthless by now. Naturally you don’t get visitors this way either. More importantly though:
You can overlook your real followers who retweet you
on their own accord and really recommend you by manually retweeting your link. These are a few among of dozens automated accounts in some cases. Tweetmeme is not particularly helpful here. It just lists retweeters chronologically. You have no clue whether they are real or just bots. You can see it once you take a closer look at their tweets but that takes a lot more of effort.
Topsy which I introduced last week does a better job at showing you real users. They are marked as influntial or highly influential in many cases. Sadly Topsy has discontinued to “view only influential” feature. Also some bot accounts have the influential badge as well.
Think about it: Can an answering machine run your business?
Likewise an almost or fully automated Twitter account is rather an annoyance than an asset.
I don’t say that automation of tweeting is no option at all. Like in life the key lies in moderation. Ironically a guy who is known for being a black hat SEO is the best example how automation can work. It’s @fantomaster – his tweets are a perfect mix of scheduled tweets, manually entered retweets and replies and tweets you never know the origin of.
Every second time I think it’s just an RSS feed or scheduled tweet he just uttered he replies to me or retweets me. So at the end of the day it’s not that you automate, it’s how you automate. An answering machine, after all, isn’t a bad idea altogether either.
When automating Twitter make sure not to overdo it.
You may automate 30, 50 or even 70% of your tweets as long as your followers have the impression that you are there. You need to be available and actually present to some extent. That may be tweeting from time to time or just once daily a few tweets. As long as you aren’t simply a bot. Also tweeting a link instantly after publication is just plain rude. You should at least make sure that the blogger or publisher her or himself can tweet the link first.
I consider blocking people from retweeting me or my links automatically. Are there ways or tools to do that? In case you know some, tell me. I’m tired of all the bots and automated accounts clogging the intertubes.
How to stop the attack of Twitter bots? Any idea?
How about a limit on the number of Tweets and RT per period. Let’s say no more than 10 per hour. Can someone with a job and a life use Twitter that much?
To me,auto tweeting and retweeting is as personal as receiving a broadcast fax. Doomed to be ignored.
I agree. The automatic retweet button that Twitter has implemented makes it to easy for people to put out some content from their site just by hitting the retweet button. No thought needed…don’t even have to read the original tweet. At least with the old way, it took a little more time and the tweet really had to have some value at least to the person who was going to retweet.
I will stick with the old method. It requires some effort but what I retweet to my followers I will have at least read.
I agree wholeheartedly with this “twitterbot” thing! Sometimes I feel like I am the only REAL person on Twitter at times, because I ask a question or make a comment on a topic and don’t receive any reaction or reply at all. I look at all the phrases, quotes, RTs and yes, they seem like just automatronic, scheduled tweets. It’s a bit disappointing.
I have to agree with Teasastips point above. At our company we don’t auto tweet or retweet. Setting a publishing schedule for an actual human to post tweets and reply to followers etc is key to targeted and better CTR if your a business and will ultimately make you more credible.
It does take some effort, but the best SEO techniques are time consuming :)
You may consider me way behind but only learned about twitter bots now. I love using the retweet button, I retweet posts that I personally like.But since some are abusing it, I may try going back to using the old method too. These retweet services must have some kind of filter which identifies twitter bots from the real bots and block bots out like how submission directories do it.
Marc: Good idea.
Teasastips: Exactly.
Gelnn and Andrew: While I consider the new retweet functionality inferior to the original one this article is more about completely automated accounts, not just people hitting retweet too fast. I think this is a lesser evil as long as people retweet manually and actually decide on a per post basis what to retweet.
I feel by automating your twitter your are defeating the purpose of Social Media. Isn’t Social media about interacting directly with our customers on a personal level? no?
what Twitter bots is different from google bots?
I agree with Generate UK. Items I retweet are always read and relevant (I hope) to my followers. This is social media and if we, by our actions, foster having our tweets ignored or nuked by bots, what have we accomplished?
When Google started to index twitter and facebook, people quit being the primary audience of tweets and updates. The purpose of the bot is to stuff as many keywords from as many twitter and fb accounts as possible into the index. That is all; no more, no less. When page one on search engines quits being the primary goal of any SEM/SEO, then we’ll see this change. Regardless of its roots, social media now has nothing to do with interaction and everything to do with stuffing keywords.
wow it is become 10x worse now and Tad Chef and Rufus is right. I also was prompted to write about this but I did not know you guys had done it before
I’ve actually found some bot seo information really helpful… but the multiple same tweets issue is really annoying.