If you use Twitter, here’s how to lose followers. It’s easy, foolproof and quick. OK, we’re being sarcastic but, believe us, if you do this kind of thing, you’ll lose followers quickly. One of our most trusted ‘followees’ on Twitter has recently started using this technique. Yes, we’ve complained to him but to no avail. We haven’t ‘unfollowed’ this person but we don’t click on his links now. His politics matched our politics too!

If we post a link on Twitter, it’s either to an article that we’ve written or to something that someone else has written or photographed. That’s obvious, right? We don’t post links to anything unless it  takes you directly to whatever it is that we want to share.

The problem comes up when a Twitter user creates an intermediate site. Instead of simply sharing their own posts, they steal a headline from another site, post it on their site and link to the original post. On Twitter, they tweet the link to their site, forcing you to go there first. Of course, they get the benefit of your visit while wasting your time. It’s a cheap, smarmy way to drive up numbers on their site. This is how it works:

Here’s an example of a tweet:

 

This is a standard tweet, a few words describing the subject, followed by a link. If you don’t know about that link,http://bit.ly,  it’s one that has been shortened by the bit.ly website  in order to take up fewer letters on Twitter.

Now, the problem is that you, the user, can’t see where that link leads. Since the words “New York Times (blog)” is mentioned, you’d assume that the link takes you to the New York Times, wouldn’t you? Sadly, it doesn’t. This link takes you to the user’s site first, then, if you’re not too ticked off at being misled, you can head over to the real, original site, in this case The New York Times. Here’s where the link goes:

 

 

This is the user’s site, not the New York Times. You’ve been hoodwinked into driving up the user’s numbers by simply following a link that looks like it leads to the New York Times. To us, this is no different than spam. On Twitter, you have to take care of your followers. You should never mislead them, trick them or, in this case, obviously try to deceive them. To us, it’s the kiss of death.

TIP: Twitter uses its own link shortening tool. Unlike bit.ly, Twitter’s link shortener does not mask the name of the site. From the photo above, can you tell where the link leads? No. If this user had used the Twitter tool to shorten the link, you would easily see that it does not lead you to the New York Times. Is this an accident? Again, no. The user knows exactly what he is doing. His intent is to hide the fact that you are going to his site first. He’s wasting your time.

Consider this a rant but also consider how your time is being wasted when this happens to you.  Help us all by not clicking on misleading links like this. Every time you click, you’re helping to perpetuate this kind of activity. We’re going to lobby Twitter to ban users who do this kind of thing. Twitter is very good about enforcing its anti-spam policies. Let’s see if we can get them to ban this stuff, too.

Thanks for reading!