Automated Twitter Messages are Spam for Your Followers

I promise, you won’t find a lot of my rants posted to this blog, but as this one is particularly relevant to Twitter and social media marketing in general, I felt it necessary to share it with you.

Over the past month, I have taken on the task of following a large number of people in my local area that I felt might be interested in networking with me on Twitter.  I connected with other marketing bloggers, web design firms, marketing companies, and everyday business owners from Baton Rouge and from the rest of the world.  I have probably followed a good 10,000 people over the course of the last month.

Automated Twitter Messages are Pure Evil

During this period of attempting to gain new followers and find great people to follow for information, I came across a service that I have come to hate, called TrueTwit Validation.

If you’re not familiar with TrueTwit, I’ll summarize quickly for you.  When someone follows you, your account will automatically send them a messaging asking them to verify that they’re a real person, if they’re not, you won’t follow them back.

TrueTwit is Getting You Unfollowed

Be honest with yourself, you’re not Ashton Kutcher, nobody is really that interested in following you unless you happen to be a celebrity.  Let’s be even more honest, there’s not one person on Twitter who actually thinks your automated response that was sent 1/2 a second after they followed you is actually being sent by you.  Sending out a automated Twitter messages isn’t going to make you look like superman, it just looks like spam.

In reality, all this is doing is showing people that all you really care about is your follower numbers, not connecting and interacting with people.

So, why are automated messages getting you unfollowed? It’s pretty simple:

• Your Spamming Your New Followers - Sorry, deny it if you want to, but automated responses are spamming people’s inbox with information that they didn’t want in the first place.  If they really wanted to follow you on Facebook, they probably would do so without you sending them an automated reminder.


• Your Exposing Yourself - I’ve yet to come across an auto-DM that wasn’t being used for self promotion.  Not once have I just simply been thanked for following, and those who did thank me actually did so manually and made a clear attempt at interacting with me.  These automated messages are doing nothing more than exposing your real desire, to obtain as many followers as possible.


• Your Asking for Too Much - Sure, I follow a lot of people that I never expect a follow back from, like Daniel Tosh for instance.  I can’t imagine what interest he might have in following me.  That being said, you just got a follower for free, and now your forcing them to leave Twitter to validate their existence just for the opportunity to interact with you.  Kind of makes you sound a bit full of yourself doesn’t it?

I am now in the practice of immediately unfollowing people who use services like these, they make it pretty obvious that they have no real intention of communicating with me in anyway.  Maybe I’ll miss out on a few celebrities who were simply trying to prevent spam in their inbox, but I think I’ll be alright.

What do you think about receiving and sending automated direct messages on Twitter?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Automated Twitter Messages are Spam for Your Followers