by Joe Wallace

Over the last few years, in addition to freelance writer and editor, I’ve also added social media specialist to my list of titles. I got started doing MySpace accounts for music projects and music journalist sites and branched out over time as Twitter, Facebook and other social media gained traction.

Among the many trends I’ve noticed among social media, one thing remains constant regardless of platform preference; there are always people willing to find new ways to send spam. Twitter is a no-brainer when it comes to spam–it’s too easy to tweet, tweet, tweet ad nauseum and send annoying direct messages until the keyboard breaks.

But it’s also just as easy to block spammers, so a bit more innovation is required to send out the annoyance.

One way spammers are using Twitter can actually affect YOUR account’s reputation, get you blocked by potential readers, clients or customers, and give you a bad name all round. And if you’re not disciplined enough to check your account on a daily basis, you might never know it’s happening.Here’s how it works. The spammer writes a re-tweet. Let’s say I’ve set up a spam account under the name Johnny Spammer. I find a target–somebody with a large number of followers who seems to have a good rep. The rep would help my Johnny Spammer site AcaiBerriesAreTasty.com if only the target would send a tweet about the spam site which reads,

“I ate 10 acai berries and lost 75 pounds! Find out how at AcaiBerriesAreTasty.com.”

But the target account, DoctorSensible, would never tweet this. So Johnny Spammer simply types up a bogus retweet:

JohnnySpammer RT@DoctorSensible I ate 10 acai berries and lost 75 pounds! Find out how at AcaiBerriesAreTasty.com

Actually, if Johnny Spammer is smart, he wouldn’t be so very obvious. Instead he might write something far more subtle:

JohnnySpammer RT@DoctorSensible The most sensible weight loss solution I’ve ever seen. AcaiBerriesAreTasty.com

The end result is the same–anyone who clicks on the link gets taken to the spam site which is completely obvious as such–it’s got the run-on paragraphs, the exclamation points, the whole nine yards. People new to @DoctorSensible think he’s a spammer or at the very least, not to be trusted.

Doctor Sensible loses street cred with people who don’t know better, and JohnnySpammer gets one more unwitting visitor to the spam site.

The exposure isn’t widespread, true. But the damage can be done–and if people pick up the bogus retweet and start spreading it around Twitter (with complaints about the spammy link) what happens to DoctorSensible’s cred then?

The key to preventing this is to check who has been retweeting you. The owner of the DoctorSensible Twitter account would sign in and look at the righthand navbar just above the Direct Message queue (the retweet section for this account would read @DoctorSensible ).

Check your retweets often–you might learn a thing or two you can put a stop to.