image by One of the things I love about Twitter is the ability to unfollow someone with the click of a button. If I don’t like what you’re saying or you’re spamming me, I don’t have to listen. This allows me to streamline my feed into only relevant updates and links. Look at the backlash caused by musician John Mayer and selling paid ad space in his tweets. Is this supposed to be a joke? Based on the initial response, I’m curious to see how many followers he’s lost as a result of this little experiment. For somebody with 120k+ followers, he’s playing with fire. However, I don’t think this will become a trend in Twitter. Nobody likes spam, and the community will fight to keep it out.
It seems to be more difficult to avoid spam on other social networking sites, especially LinkedIn. I am a member of many different online marketing and SEO groups, which I joined to be part of the conversation that is happening, learn from the community and hopefully contribute my own wisdom. Unfortunately, half the discussion threads on these groups tend to be self-promoting messages from irritating networkers that are likely trying to grow their number of connections above the one million mark (and then they get a golden ticket to LinkedIn Land!). I am not always willing to weed through the nonsense to get to the real content, so my solution is to turn email updates off and not allow group members to contact me directly. Great, so I just defeated the purpose of joining these groups in the first place.
Is the LinkedIn community not willing to fight as hard as the Twitter community to keep spam out? Or is this a problem that LinkedIn itself should address? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
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