I am not a huge fan of Twitter as I don’t do technology and to be honest I end up spending all day following interesting links and getting no work done.
However, after some time ignoring it and hoping it will go away I decided to give it another whirl tonight and guess what … Twitter has been invaded by adult dating sites.
I logged in tonight to check out the twitter feed of a blogger I particularly enjoy reading (it’s about farming so I won’t bore you with a link).
In my list of friends was a Tweet from Mike at KK Smarts (he’s an adwords guru and a thoroughly nice chap) and being supportive I had a peek and I’m pleased I did.
He has made a video about Tweetdeck showing us less technical people how to use this software. His video is from a business angle but very useful even if you’re just interested in puppies, gardening or limbo dancing.
Ever the student I downloaded Tweetdeck and made great use of the video pause button while I followed Mike’s instructions.
Because I run an online dating site for country people in the UK, write this dating blog and a countryside blog too, I like to stay up to date with what is happening in both the dating industry and the countryside.
Following along with the video I discovered that in Tweetdeck I can create columns and search for Tweets by keywords I enter.
No sooner had I created the search column for “online dating” than tweetdeck started pinging away (must remember to ask Mike how to turn that annoying pinging sound off).
The spam immediately started, at a rate of, on average, 10 Tweets per minute from just one dating site.
Of course all the avatars are of half naked models … and we know how many of those hang out on dating sites in the middle of the night … ahem!!
Most of the Tweets read like this “Indian successful guy 32 years looking for exciting women for kissing” or “Missing some adult fun? S*x makes it better.”
It’s interesting to note that all the male avatars play the “nice guy looking for a woman” card but the female avatars all say “come get some” .. psychology is an amazing advertising tool, I’m sure Mike would agree.
The website in question is tacky online dating site .. ok that’s not the real name and perhaps it’s a nice site if you like no strings encounters but boy they can spam with the best of them.
There are two things worrying me about this site.
First, as soon as I pressed the link the home page announced “members near Edinburgh”. I don’t live anywhere near Edinburgh but because my Twitter and Facebook accounts are linked and Facebook doesn’t have a Cumbria region I ended up ticking Edinburgh. So I’m very curious to know what software this website is using in order to know I am in the Facebook Edinburgh region. It’s just feels like an invasion of my privacy (is there such a thing online?).
Secondly it’s the blantant lying most of these dating sites use. After every Tweet it says “free online adult dating” but of course when you check the site out you soon realise you have to pay to even see all the profiles on the site.
Pure spam, they should go in the spam box with the Nigerian spammers and the letters awarding you £6,000,000 if you just send a cheque for £500.
Although I did have a real giggle when I saw the “report sexually explicit adverts ” button at the bottom of their home page and then went to the join now page (research people, research) and was asked if I give oral or do threesomes (and they are just the questions I could mention on this blog) … gosh nothing sexually explicit about that then!
Of course the site must be making money or they couldn’t afford to pay spammers to drop 10 plus links an hour from numerous Twitter accounts.
It’s just a shame that spammers invade every aspect of our online lives and there is some great dating advice articles linked to on Twitter but of course they just get lost in the spam.
September 10th, 2009 at 6:39 am
The basic reason of that rise is an incredible increase in desire of having dating mates.
September 11th, 2009 at 7:20 am
I tweet for an adult dating site, and try not to spam, but contibute something interesting, or tweet blog updates. I agree that there is a lot of spamming going on, most of it is automated. Maybe I’m missing a trick but it’s hard to see what the benefit is, as most people just unfollow them straight away.
Nice blog and post, I’ll be checking back to read some more…
September 17th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
It’s a real shame that sites have been able to get away with such blatant lying. Maybe the FTC will crack down on these too soon, like they’re now doing with fake blogs. Anyhow – just my 2 cents worth.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
That is just too funny … I write a post about how spammy Twitter has become due to adult dating sites and you then spam my blog with links to adult sites (have removed the links by the way).
September 26th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Automated spamming is a problem in most of the Internet and it seems Twitter is no exception!
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:52 am
Haha the spammers here on this blog don’t seem to realize that the links are all dofollow. It was a great post sorry to see it being overun by dating site spammers in the comment section…
October 5th, 2009 at 8:59 am
Hi Marie
All part of life with spammers I’m afraid. The strange thing is do they really imagine people seriously looking for a good dating site to join would follow spam links?!
November 23rd, 2009 at 3:39 am
I don’t see anything wrong with adult dating sites. The biggest mistake is the spamming effort. They use people common interest (everyone single will normally interested in dating right?) to promote their spam links.
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Agreed Donna, each to their own but I just object to spammy sites tactics (like all the fake profile photos used to entice people to pay). Kids use Twitter and some of the links went straight to pages that made me almost lose my lunch and I’m no prude.
January 23rd, 2010 at 4:45 am
I think this is just a part of any social networking site. Where there is traffic, there is business and online dating and porn are big business.
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April 12th, 2010 at 5:31 am
I get your point about adult dating site spamming twitter but twitter is just like any other technology, there are those who use it properly and there are those who abuse it. I have been on the online since Internet because available commercially, I remember back them it was just seen as a tool for nerds and perverts because the adult industry was and the other perverted people embraced the technology before others do, there is an element of that with twitter and most technology. Many respectable people and businesses use twitter, sadly so do many not so respectable people like the adult dating sites you mentioned.
April 29th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Yeah I agree with that, twitter has become spammy because of adult dating. They don’t care about proper blogging. But there also spam site that spams comments.
May 1st, 2010 at 7:37 am
Being on of the top industries when it comes to revenues, it was just a matter of time that adult dating sites to invade and promote themselves on Twitter and other alike social networking websites. Imagine the potential of those websites’ market…
May 3rd, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Hi Bogdan
But doies anyone actually click on those links? I suppose they must or people wouldn’t be paid to add the links … very strange.
May 7th, 2010 at 12:00 am
Are you wondering why you got the ‘members near Edinburgh’ advertisement? I don’t think you Edinburgh came up based on your Facebook location – but it’s possible. Rather, your location can be determined via your IP address. Do you know Google Analytics? I use it for my sites, you can get very useful reports about your visitors (eg, which keyword they used to get to your site, how many minutes they spend on your time, WHICH TOWN are they from etc.). But Google Analytics is for giving you reports about your site – you can’t use it to create messages like you mentioned above (you need a webcoder for that). BTW, Google Analytics is free – and you can build it into wordpress blogs too. I think it’s called ‘ultimate google analytics’ and you need to search for it among the wordpress plugins and install it from there. Anyway, nice blog!
May 13th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Sally Says:
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Agreed Donna, each to their own but I just object to spammy sites tactics (like all the fake profile photos used to entice people to pay). Kids use Twitter and some of the links went straight to pages that made me almost lose my lunch and I’m no prude.
Temi says> You will be surprise how many gullible people there are out there. I read somewhere that when spammers send out say 1,000 of those really daft emails saying you have won this or that you need to pay x amount to collect you prize, about 7% of the recipient actually respond and pay the money. Some people do fall for all the fake profiles etc. I agree, this is not a way to build a business but the people doing such things are not building a long term business, they are usually looking for quick money.
May 13th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Hi Attila
Edinburgh came up because it’s the nearest city covered in their programme. My area is very rural so is not an option … but we have organised a group to campaign for our own area lol
August 11th, 2010 at 7:00 am
my answer would be turn off your speakers
I have used hummingbird,it’s a good tool for getting more followers
I usually set up a twitter account with my site,when my site updates,it automatically tweets to my followers