As most of you know, we’re on Twitter. We use Twitter to share links to our own posts plus links to other sites that match our interests and political leanings. If you use Twitter, you know that fake profiles abound on that particular social media outlet but we’re a bit confused about our latest discovery. One tiny company, a Canadian company unfortunately, is using Twitter to promote itself but, and this is the sad part, they are doing it in what seems to be a devious, smarmy, backhanded way. Here’s the scoop on what they are doing.
Someone followed us on Twitter. No big deal. We don’t have all that many followers but we manage to pick up a few here and there every week. Unlike some users, we actually try to read the tweets that come through, if not every day, then most days. Sure, we hide some very active users but even they share some good links. At this point, we have more followers than followees, if you know what we mean.
The person that followed us seemed to be OK on the surface but, after checking, we found out that ‘she’ represents a company that has a history of using fake profiles in order to drum up business. First, they create a profile using a photo of a pretty girl. Then they start to add friends or followers in order to promote their business website. This isn’t like BestBuy or Dell using Twitter effectively to promote their business, nothing like that. It’s a rather devious, and silly, attempt to promote a business that should know better.
We’ve seen this kind of thing in China quite frequently. A website will enable direct chats with a sales agent, let’s call her Ruby. There is a photo of Ruby and she looks quite nice, even somewhat hot, if you get our drift. The problem is that Ruby is actually some guy named Tom, no more a female than any of the people who work at this questionable company with the fake Twitter accounts. All the people listed on their site are men. It seems obvious where their heads are when they try to trick Twitter users by using an attractive girl’s photo to promote their business. So far, we’ve found two fake profiles but we’re sure there are more.
A word to the wise, check out who is following you before you blindly follow them back. Promoting your business with fake profiles is no different than spam. We don’t post the name of the website, that’s for sure but we will post photos of the two fake profiles:
It’s obvious from the company’s site that their clients are dealing with amateurs. First, it’s a WordPress site. That in itself isn’t bad but for a promotion and design company, the slow load times are painful. We can only assume that they don’t have a dedicated server and/or their webmaster doesn’t know what they’re doing. Second, there are typos and bad English all over the site. That’s a vital clue to figuring this all out. If a company doesn’t take the time to edit their own website, you can bet that they won’t give you professional service.
This isn’t a huge problem but we want to make you aware of what’s out there. We’ve outlined the problems with Facebook already. Every now and then we’ll let let you know about scams on Twitter.
Thanks for reading!