Tag Archives: Twitter advice

Don’t Ever Click These Links! Block and Report Spam

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Simple Twitter tip: here’s one example of a standard kind of tweet you should always immediately block and report spam. Here are the telltale characteristics: 

  1. Just your handle (mine is @timberry, which you see in this example) and a link. Nothing else. 
  2. A new twitter account with no face; just one of those egg pictures. 
Warning: don’t ever click that link! It’s either just spam or worse (worse than spam is malware, tiny programs that attack your computer). 
 
What to do? 
 
I recommend you do a public service and block and report these people to discourage others. You could just ignore it of course, but this takes just a a few seconds: 

  1. Click on the account name, as shown here … in this case it’s “Barrom Hall.”
  2. That opens up a quick profile, shown here below. Note in this case we see exactly what I expected. It’s a spam account, just created, with no real content, just spam tweets like this one, to other people. If I discovered this was coming from a more legitimate account, with history, and real tweets, then I might just ignore it. But this is classic Twitter evil doing: the account is just spamming people.  So you hold your mouse over the small silhouette  to open a drop-down menu, and choose “Report” as shown here. That will simultaneously block and report spam for that account. You’ve done good.

 

To be sure, this isn’t the only kind of bad tweets and spam to block. It is however, both the most common and the easiest to identify and avoid. 

5 Rules for Kindergarten Friends and Twitter

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Not long ago I was driving a five-year-old grandson to kindergarten when he asked me how to make friends. That’s ironic because networking is hardly my strong suit, but he doesn’t know that. And I guess that’s what kids expect grandfathers to know, so I really wanted to help him. grandsonsI tried. It sounded like a lot of clichés to me, but then I’m not five years old.

I think it’s about Empathy. That’s too big a word for a kid, so I called it feeling what the other kids feel. You have to be a friend to have a friend; the golden rule; kindness. etc. My mother would have said “put yourself in the other kid’s place.” My mother-in-law called it “see yourself through the other kids’ eyes.”

Just a few hours later, in a group of mostly-baby-boomer types drawn together by interest in entrepreneurship and possible angel investment, Twitter came up. I like it and I said so. Somebody asked me for supposed secrets of success in Twitter.

Without actually thinking of that  moment with my grandson earlier that day, I gave them these five tips for success with Twitter. And as I did so, it struck me that it’s mostly the same thing: empathy.

  1. Offer something other people want. In Twitter specifically, nobody cares what you’re watching on television or eating for lunch. It’s publishing, not babbling. Use twitter to offer people quotes, humor, ideas, and – my favorite by far – useful links they can follow up on.
  2. When in doubt, treat others like you want them to treat you. Teasing, mocking, insulting, shouting (all caps) are not appreciated.
  3. When you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything.
  4. When you’re angry, wait. Breathe. Think about it before you do it. Public arguments are ugly. And (when published on Twitter, at least) they live forever. Angry words are not biodegradable.
  5. Return favors. When somebody does you a favor, remember it, and do them a favor back. Thank you is nice but a favor in return is more effective. In twitter at least, too much thanking becomes clutter. Twitter involves a lot of passing other people’s tweets (posts) along, called re-tweeting, so when somebody likes what you’ve published (tweeted) there and passes it to others, find something of theirs to pass along (re-tweet).

The next time I was with my grandson, I gave him almost this same list, revised only slightly, for kindergarten use. And while I’d like to report that he took it to heart and he’s now the life of the proverbial kindergarten party… well, at least we’re both still trying.

(Image: My own photo. All rights reserved. © Timothy J. Berry)