mediabistro.com

It happened again.

I read the bio of a new follower, thought it aligned with my values/direction/interests/whatever, and clicked the Follow button.

A DM (direct message) landed in my inbox. “Your guaranteed income of $3,000 to $8,000 a month from home,” it promised, with a handy little link to click.

A spammy, virus-laden link, as I found when fumbling to click their name to bring up their bio again (sometimes Tweetdeck is a little too small on my screen). Agh!

If I’m annoyed enough by an auto-DM, hitting the unfollow button is part of my personal social media management. Blatant sales pitches fall into that category, and any get-rich-quick links are just insulting. I have no problem unfollowing and never looking back.

Except this time. Surely I hadn’t followed someone with blatant advertising all over them!

And I hadn’t. This person is a professor, a Gen Y marketing expert, has an impressive follower/following ratio, and has tweets that actually make sense.

So this time, I did something I ordinarily never do: I sent a direct message back, asking if they knew their account was sending out a bad DM. It’s worth the social experiment to see what (if anything) they say.

Do you ignore spammy auto-DMs, or is it grounds for an instant unfollow? Do you ever ask the perpetrator just what they’re thinking?