Twitter encouraging spammers or highlight trends? Analysis using ‘TweetDeck’

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

So I have been following the word ’social’ on TweetDeck to figure out trends in the socialsphere. This morning I saw a really fascinating trend where users were tweeting (or actually spamming? ) with the message:

“See how big companies use social media: : http://blogcouncil.alltop.com”

The first person to blog about it was kitchenwench who posted:

After which there were 6 users who posted exactly the same tweet at 23.01 yesterday:

Then at 8.01 this morning:

Then at 9.01am, 10.01am and finally at 11.01am:

Interesting facts:

• All the accounts were different
• At any time approximately 5 people twittered
• The message didn’t have any Retweeter, RT or Re-ping signs.

So what is going on ? Are these accounts hacked ? Or is it just one person with several fake accounts ? Is there a commonly known application which update several twitter accounts at once ? Is this a ploy to get a higher pagerank / traffic ?

What ever the case the fact is that blogcouncil.alltop.com is actually a really nice resource for companies to see how corporates are using social tools. Although not being upfront about things and spamming the twittersphere with links is clearly malpractice !

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