Like most people, I hate spam. But I recently needed to promote a product on Twitter, which left me having to try to figure out where the line is drawn between spam and reasonable product promotion. I also regularly have to walk the line when I promote my blog posts.
I still don’t know if I’ve drawn it right. I’m interested in your opinion. In addition to your comments on this post, I’d love it if you’d take my quick survey, so I can report on the overall results.
Background
My product is TweetPackages: basically the equivalent of the upcoming Lists functionality that Twitter recently announced. I needed to promote individual Tweet Packages to sets of users, interested in specific topics. As an example, I created Tweet Packages for various NFL football teams, like this one for the Seahawks.
I promoted in two main ways:
- I tweeted about the packages using hashtags for the relevant topics. An example tweet is “#NFL #Rams – Follow the team with this Tweet Package http://bit.ly/A2EYc”
- I tweeted to each person who was included in a package, letting them know they were in it. An example of that is “@heyjudeonline You’re in a Tweet Package! http://bit.ly/J8YWD (To put this package on your website, see http://bit.ly/3hQ7oh.)”
Who Do I Tweet to?
In general, I didn’t tweet about packages to my own followers. I did tweet to specific audiences via hashtags. So, for my football packages, I tweeted to those searching for or talking about the Seahawks, the NFL, etc. For my television packages, I tweeted specifically to people talking about Glee or Melrose Place, by using the appropriate hashtags.
How Often Do I Tweet?
One of the hardest decisions was how often to tweet my promotional messages. I started at a very low volume. But when I checked the timeline by searching for, say, #NFL, my tweets barely registered. (Of course, some of that was because there Tweeps who were swamping the timeline with their own promotional messages.)
I didn’t want to be obnoxious, but I also did want to have a chance of football fans seeing my tweets. So, I upped the volume somewhat. I found it challenging trying to ensure my message appeared frequently enough to be seen, but not so frequently that it was seen as spam. Or so frequently that it would appear repeatedly in people’s TweetDeck groups, and the like.
Frequency, Relevancy, Reach
As I evaluated my own dilemma, I realized the issues I was dealing with boiled down to the same ones that online advertisers deal with. (Hmmm, what a surprise.) I needed to get my message out. But in order to do so, and not to feel like a spammer, I wanted to get good reach, with good relevancy, but limited frequency.
- Reach—The number of different people who see my tweet (or an ad).
- Frequency—The number of times a given person sees my tweet (or an ad).
- Relevancy—The quality of the match between my tweet’s (or ad’s) contents and the reader’s interests. I.e. if this reader is a big Jets football fan and my tweet is about following the Jets football players on Twitter, the tweet is pretty relevant.
My goal was to get my message out to people who would be interested in it (relevancy). And to get as many of those target customers as possible to see it (reach). But not to make them see it more than once or twice (frequency). If they saw my tweet once or twice and didn’t click, they weren’t interested.
Value, Tone, Relationship
Some other factors that don’t necessarily come up for online advertisers, but might pertain in a social environment:
- Value—The amount of free value included as part of the tweet or the content it’s linked to. For example, the tweet might include a discount for Twitter users. Or the link it gives might include some good information as well as a sales pitch. Or, even if the product is not relevant to you or something you want at this time, maybe you see it as generally useful and therefore are willing to excuse the somewhat irrelevant tweet.
- Tone—The “socialness” of the tweet. Does it sound like an ad, or sound more like a question, or a helpful tip given in passing.
- Relationship—The nature of your relationship with the person who tweets, such as whether you chose to follow them (versus automatically followed them because they followed you). Or whether you’ve had conversations with them in Twitter. Or whether they’ve been a regular source of good information or entertainment before the promotional tweet.
When Do You Think It’s Spam?
Hence my questions. I’m assuming from the user’s perspective, reach isn’t an issue. In other words, as a Twitter user, I really don’t care how many times your tweet appears as long as I don’ t see it over and over again.
Relevancy
- Is it spam if you tweet about a product or business and use hash tags?
- Is it spam if you tweet about a product or business and don’t use hash tags?
- Is it spam if you tweet about a product or business to your followers?
- Is it only spam if you tweet about a product or business and use hash tags that don’t actually pertain to the product/business? (Like tweeting advertisements using trending topic hash tags.)
Frequency
- Is it spam if you see the same tweet even just two times?
- Is it only spam if you see the same tweet multiple times a day?
- Is it spam if you see the same tweet several times over the course of the week?
- What about if you see different tweet text, but they all link to the same site?
Usefulness
- Do you view tweets less as spam when a blogger is promoting their blog posts, even if they repeatedly promote the same blog post during the week?
- Are you more forgiving of some products than others? Does it depend upon whether you think the product is actually useful? To you? Or to others?
- If the tweet promotes a link to a site or product, and you find something useful there (like a good blog post or tool), are you more willing to put up with seeing the same promotional tweet appear a few times?
Tone
- Is it spam if it’s boastful: here’s my great product and click my link to read more?
- Is it spam if it’s joking or entertaining in nature?
- Is it spam if the tweet seems to just mention the product in passing?
Relationship
- Is it spam if it comes from someone you chose to follow (rather than blindly followed because they followed you)?
- Is it spam if you’ve had several Twitter conversations with this person?
- Is it spam if you’ve followed this person for a while and generally find their tweets useful or entertaining or otherwise engaging?
- Would you view it as spam if, despite having a relationship with this Tweep, they sent the same promotional message too many times?
I’d love to hear what you think. And I’d like to quanitfy this a bit. So, please comment below and take my quick survey.
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Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send – most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.
Hi Neicole, defining spam is a very difficult topic primarily because the definition of spam is acually very personal (on behalf of the recipient). If the information I receive is relevant to me, then it is never spam. If that same information is sent to someone that is not interested in that topic, they may consider it to be spam. A bit of advertising (since we are all in some form of business) is OK as long as there are other valuable topics being communicated as well. The key is to build a “relationship” with followers based on legitimate communications, then the “advertising” becomes just part of the interaction. Isn’t that the real power of marketing through social media?
Showing my age, we used to call it Junk Mail! But, others called it Marketing Information. And, because of online spam, it’s actually making a comeback, but in a far more targeted form.
To me, spam (the really bad stuff) is a blatant use of continuous promotion of junk I’m not at all interested in and is typically delivered to me by grabbing my name from other sources or using my references to others in my network to generate mass promotional distribution lists. This is why I’m very guarded about who I follow and who I let follow me.
The real key, in my opinion, is relevancy to the recipient. Even if I see something from someone I have no relationship with, but it is relevant to my interests, that is not spam.
But, like I said originally, I believe the definition of spam is unique to each individual.
Maybe my view is slanted because I have a keen interest in learning how to market online using free services and tools, but in a social networking situation where I can choose whether to receive or not receive messages from others, there is no such thing as spam. Spam is sending unsolicited messages without the recipient’s permission. On Twitter, only @ messages can even fall into that definition. If Twitter really wanted to get rid of spam, they could disable the sending of @ messages.
P.S. I think many people see spam as “unwanted” messages. These may be junk messages, but when I have the ability to simply turn off all messages from a particular source, I don’t think they can properly be called spam if I gave my consent to receive them.
Great points! Thanks! Opt in or opt out ability is key, for sure. And I think relevancy is very important. I’m really interested to see the results of my survey, because I hypothesize it really does make a difference whether you view yourself as having a relationship with this person and/or whether you think the “spam” might actually be valuable to you or someone else. The latter, or the “junk” as you called it, Steve, really varies from person to person and time to time. One man’s spam is another man’s steak!
I just took your poll but I think I would have changed a few things. I am a person who really thinks the only time it is spam is if there is nothing relevant in the information to say a blog or discussion. On Twitter, who cares? People are too touchy and for the love of Chrysler, who can figure out what makes EVERYONE happy? People need to chill the heck out and get over themselves. People are just trying to make a living in this absolutely horrible economy!
Well, Twam, or Twitter Spam, would be defined as an unsolicited tweet in your stream for a product that you don’t want or need. However, ultimately, aren’t all tweets unsolicited? Your post raises more questions than it answers, ultimately. Might have to blog about that
I LOVE your avatar!!!
I agree re: raising more questions. Maybe my survey will help answer some of them. Relevancy (a product I don’t want or do want) is clearly important.
I think Steve is right that (to some degree) SPAM is in the eye of the beholder. The make money fast pitches are clearly spam. The new trend in which a user makes the same pitch one at a time to others but using the @ to direct it to a user is clearly spam. But promoting something that will be of value to a certain audience, and identifying it by a proper hashtag seems legitimate to me.
We’re all allowed to do a certain amount of promotion, but the rule of thumb for social media has traditionally been that promotional Tweets should make up a smaller fraction of your content than the rest of your Tweets. So whether you Tweet the same thing twice or 4 times may not be as relevant as how many other Tweets come between those. If you promote X 4 times in one day (and X is of real interest to some people) but also made 40 non-promotional Tweets then a person viewing your stream probably won’t consider you to be a spammer.
If I see the same message from you a few times in a day, and that’s all I see, I may find it annoyingly repetitive. But if I also see lots of other interesting things, then I’ll cut you more slack. (And given the volume of Tweets I may be less likely to notice that you’ve been repeating.) So overall I think much of this has to do with context.
Thanks, Heidi. I think you’re right that the ratio is a critical factor. And relevancy is important, of course.
Thanks for commenting!