Think Before You Engage: 100 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign

84. How Do I Prevent Spam?

Spam is an ever-growing problem on the social web. Most social sites provide an option to report spam, but it's getting harder to prevent from happening in the first place. Before connecting with people on services such as Twitter, look at their profiles first. Their content is a good indicator of whether they spam, and good content can help prevent your account from attracting spam.

For your own website, other measures can prevent spam from invading your email or blog. These include:

• Don't list your email address. When spam bots scan the web looking for email addresses, they look at the format of the text. If they see [e-mail], they see that it's an email address and they can collect it for later use. However, if they see something like dave [at] bullfrog-media.com, it won't be recognized by a bot even if it still is actually linked to my address through the use of HTML code.
• Use CAPTCHAs for forms. With a little bit of coding, you can require people to answer a question or decipher an image before they can submit comments to a blog or respond to a contact form.
• Use a form for people to contact you through your website rather than giving out your email address. This can help you to keep your email address more private, for you to distribute as you choose rather than for people to collect it.
• Moderate content. With services such as Disqus ...