Twitter Sues Companies That Encourage Spam

Famous microblogging social network Twitter is suing five companies that encourage spam in the network.  The lawsuit is aimed at three companies – TweetAttacks, TweetAdder and TweetBuddy – and two individuals: James Lucero (justinlover.info) and Garland Harris (troption.com) for violating Twitter’s usage terms by selling software that encourages firms to spam the service.

Twitter declares that “taking legal action sends a clear message to all would-be spammers that there are serious and costly consequences to violating our Rules with their annoying and potentially malicious activity”.

Regardless of this lawsuit’s success, such an initiative is definitely worth mentioning. Probably each Twitter user received some spam and wasn’t too pleased to see it. Even if the final decision will favour Twitter, there isn’t a 100% guarantee all spam will disappear from the microblogging network. The lawsuit is however an important step showing all Twitter users that the network doesn’t take spam lightly and definitely a great step to take in overall branding.

A successful social media presence isn’t the result of relying solely on automated services to manage an account. Building a good presence takes time invested in engaging followers on each social channel chosen for promotion, and it is an ongoing communication process with results that get better and better in time.

Any Twitter user should be very careful when taking actions for increasing followers or their RTs count. Followers generally appreciate good and relevant tweets, quality content and, most probably, dislike and unfollow users who resort to spamming. It is one thing to schedule a tweet at a given hour, and a completely different situation to allow third party services to send tweets in your name, without your approval. This should also be an alarm for all users to carefully read terms and conditions of each approved application that accesses their Twitter account.