Did you know that 95% of email is spam, that’s an incredible percentage. I truly hate spam and phishing is even worse.

So when I logged into Twitterfox and looked at my messages I was intrigued to see that I had 2 messages from people who were not following me. The messages were offering information /service or promotions around subject matters that I had twittered about.

It was obvious to me that these people obviously had a Twitter alert of some form on specific key phrases and they were then sending these people messages and offers.

In the world of permission based marketing, I am not sure how I feel about this. The other week I tweeted about looking for a 1:1 yoga teacher in Leeds and some people that I don’t know sent me some great links. As I had asked for the information I was grateful for their recommendations.

One of these spam messages was around promoting their networking group. Personally I really do object to this. Just because I go to networking events and Twitter about where I am, does not mean that people who are not following me can promote their events to me.

How to use Twitter as part of a promotional strategy

Dell has been running an effective campaign to drive sales through Twitter. They have set up a Twitter account called http://twitter.com/DellOutlet and the followers receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store.

Using Twitter this way to allows the user to get permission based promotions, rather than getting spam messages promoting the offer / service.

To turn this around the companies should be using Twitter to drive traffic to the site, rather than using a Twitter alert service and sending direct messages to users. I can see that there will be a growth in Twitter spam, and it’s then about how you can manage this.

The question is – when it’s email you can get spam filters to block the junk email that you get – is there an application which will filter the junk Twitter messages.