I am no proponent of 'Black Hat' techniques used and abused by many a internet marketing gurus for monetary gains.  I thought it would be nice to share these with the internet marketing community as I have been irritated no end by all these unsavoury tactics while using twitter.  Many of the victims of such tactics are totally unaware of what is happening to them.  In fact I stumbled upon these techniques just by accident as I tried to investigate the mysterious phenomenon of my followers vanishing within a day of signing up.  So here are some of the 'Black Hat' techniques being adopted at twitter.

Follow and Remove:  This is the most popular of the Black Hat Twitter Techniques used unscrupulously by many.  It works like this.  Just start following any number of persons may be even thousands.  As a courtesy many people will follow you back.  The moment they start following you, just remove their names from your friends list.  The advantage is you can beat the 2000 or 110% follow norm set by twitter for one.  The other advantages are while you may be following very few, you would be followed innocently by thousands and would look very impressive and important to new followers.  I discovered this when as on some days dozens would unfollow for no apprent reason.

Remove and Follow Back:  Now this an innovation over the 1st one above.  All new followers show up on top.  Anyone you remove and then add again you will list at the top.  I stumbled on this again by accident as I have been keenly studying the people who remove me.  Some of these names show up again within a day or two.  I had to literally tear my hairs to understand what is happening.  After much thought I came to the concludsion that If I unfollow someone and then follow them back, I would show up on top.  Can you beat this kind of devious thinking.

Viral Trick:  I do not know if creating a script which can give followers as viral effect will help at all.  Many people have a script where you add yourself to the list and link or retweet the message on twitter.  Anyone signing up through the link and his followers who sign will automatically be placed as your follower too.  You can build a follower list fast.  I did too but then realized that people are following me for no apparent logic of business or shared interests.  Having a porn site as a follower is hardly of use if you are not promoting porn.  That is why I chose to place this viral method among the black hat tricks.

There may be many more which I am unaware of at the moment and would post them the moment I learn them.

The black hat Vs. the white hat debate has been going on for long in the internet marketing community.  While I would like to steer clear of the debate as all of us end up doing some black hat stuff some times knowingly or unknowingly, the black hat stuff is an irritant at best on an unsuspecting community and a drain at worst on genuine marketing tactics as it places the user at an unfair advantage.

So choose yourself what you want to do.

^{Srinivasan Gopal}