This is not a recent occurrence but Twitter is turning into quite a nice platform for getting unsuspecting users to learn about you and/or your company with very little effort.

Three easy steps to making me angry and confused for spending time to learn about your spammy self.

1. Get a Twitter profile
2. Post enough times throughout the day to make it look like you are somewhat legit (whether or not you are legit doesn’t matter)
3. Start maneuvering the public social graph on Twitter adding anyone and everyone you find that looks like they aren’t a friend hoarder like yourself and will give you the light of day to visit your profile, read a few tweets, and click on your link
4. … profit?

It seems a little bit petty to be complaining about this but I’m honestly unsure as to how to combat these people who follow me on Twitter and are obviously only doing so as an advertising mechanism. Some are legitimate, reasonable people with interesting lives and are only out there to find other interesting people to follow. Most, though, have a following-to-follower ratio of over 100-to-1 - obviously they are not showing much discression.

Twitter gives me a few options for these people: block or do nothing. Should I block them or just ignore it? I don’t actually care if they follow me, but it sure inflates my own following-to-follower ratio. I don’t want to come off as an ass and block someone legitimately interested in following me (though I don’t know why that would be the case, either).

Petty, I know. Yay social media marketing. :/