Stop the Spam

Photo credit: buggolo on Flickr

As any of you who have been doing the social media thing for more than a week know, there is a certain four-lettered evil that lurks the waters of every social media site and attacks at seemingly random (and infuriating) intervals.

Yes, I’m talking about the boiling black evil that is spam.

I try to be an optimistic person and I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, especially when I receive spam from non-robot accounts. I say things like, well maybe they’re new or maybe they don’t realize that’s considered spam and I ignore the first offense. (The second offense, however, gets a healthy dose of the spam gun).

Look, I understand why well-intentioned people spam. I understand wanting more Twitter followers or more likes on your Facebook page or more exposure to your awesome blog or more sales of your book. I get it, honestly, I do. But there’s a right and wrong way to go about achieving those goals, and spamming people with links to said pages is definitely not the right way.

Now what exactly counts as spamming? some of you may be wondering. Behold the examples: 

• Sending someone a link that they did not ask for = SPAM.


• DMing someone a link that they did not ask for = SPAM.


• Leaving a link to your blog/book/whathaveyou on someone’s blog/FBwall/whatever that they did not ask for = SPAM.


• Tweeting about your book/blog/whateveritis = NOT SPAM (but if you overdo it, people may treat it as such anyway, so be careful).

When in doubt, if you want to share a link to your blog/Amazon page/FB, to someone who didn’t ask for it, don’t. It’s pretty simple.  

You see, the problem with spam is that it’s counter-productive, because when people see they’ve been spammed a link, more times than not they react the same way: by blocking you. Not only did they not open your link to see what you had to share, but now you’ve just blacklisted yourself, or at least left a bad impression.

The way to earn more followers or page views isn’t to spam people with links—it’s to earn more followers and page views by being genuine and supportive of others and creating great content worth sharing. Once you’ve done those things, you won’t need to spam because other people will be sharing your pages to their friends and followers for you. And trust me, it feels much better to have happy followers share your work than to try to peddle your pages on your own.

So go out there, be a good person, and stop the evil spread of spam. Your followers and page views will be glad that you did.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh on spam? Have you ever been happy about a link that was spammed to you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.