The past few weeks have seen a substantial increase in twitter spam. We see these cycles occur periodically on the social web. An influx of newer users and seasoned users becoming comfortable both play a part.

As they say, the best defense is a good offense – understand what spam is, how to avoid it, and what to do if you do become the victim.

What Is Twitter Spam?

Twitter spam can take several different forms.

• Sending DMs without your knowledge. This usually occurs when you follow a bad link.
• Sending tweets without your knowledge. This can happen when you follow a bad link or if you authorize a bad application (more below).

How Twitter Spam Works – the Digital Pyramid Scheme

Links

Most tweeps share links via a URL shortener – a web site that creates short-length URLs so you have more of your 140 characters available to you for the tweet. bit.ly and tinyurl.com are two examples of URL shorteners.

Unfortunately, with all the good they provide, they also hide the real URL so we don’t know what we’re really trying to look at until we click on the link. That’s how we get spammed.

Protect yourself and your followers.  For every person who visits a spam link sent by you, they in turn spam all of their followers. That’s why twitter spam is so infectious. It doesn’t take long at all before your click has been responsible for tens of thousands of spam tweets and DMs.

Bots and Services

Another likely candidate are those bots or so-called “services” that offer automatic services – e.g. auto-follow, auto-tweet, or auto-DM.  These services need to use the integrated twitter authentication to work, but some of them will abuse the privilege and use your account to send spam.

Before signing up for one of these services do your due diligence.  Ask your friends or followers for a recommendation, and google the name of the service and the word spam to see what people are saying about them.

Best Practices – How to Avoid Twitter Spam

Twitter spam tends to be pretty generic because the same tweet or DM needs to sound appropriate coming from any twitter user. It’s usually something like “Do you think you can answer this question?” or “I’ll bet my IQ is higher than yours!”

If you receive a tweet or DM and you’re curious if it’s valid, go to google and search for the URL they linked to and the word spam. If it is spam, you’ll often (but not always) get a list of people talking about how they got spammed with that link. Then, be a good citizen and DM the person who sent you the link to let them know their account has been compromised.

Some of the URL shorteners have setup ways for you to avoid clicking on bad links. bit.ly has a great previewer plugin for Firefox and TweetDeck has a preview option for bit.ly as well. I also recommend reading Joshua Long’s great article listing many of the URL shortener previewers.

Twitter takes spam seriously too. Follow Twitter’s official spam watch account @spam for current activity and issues, and read through @spam’s favorite tips to help you get started.

Yes it’s a bit of a pain, but preferable to the effort to clean up a spam attack. You’ve invested a lot of time building up your credibility online. Don’t let a simple click of a link damage it.

If You’re the Victim of Twitter Spam

If you think you’ve done something to start a spam attack, do the following:

• Log out of twitter immediately
• Close all browser windows
• Close any twitter applications (e.g. TweetDeck, Twitterific)
• Open a browser window. Log in to twitter and change your password.
• Go to your Connections page and review the list of applications you’ve granted access to your twitter account (see screenshot below). If you see an application you suspect as the culprit – or even one you just don’t recognize – click “Revoke Access”. If it turns out to be an app you use, you can always re-authorize its access the next time you try to use it.
  
• Report the activity to Twitter by following these instructions.
• Delete any unauthorized tweets or DMs. Note that depending on a user’s settings they may have already received your DM in their email.  Deleting the DM won’t delete the email that was sent.
• Tweet that your account was the victim of spam and to disregard the activity. Be as specific as you can but DO NOT include the spam URL!  An apology is a nice touch as well since it’s likely that one of your followers will unknowingly click on the link anyway.
• Update your twitter applications (e.g. TweetDeck) to use the new password.  It’s important to do this soon because after 3 failed login attempts twitter locks your account for one hour.

I hope this post will help most of you avoid twitter spam altogether.  If you’ve been the victim, what did you do to clean it up?  Share your story with us so we can all be smarter tweeps.