“OMG!! I just saw the CRAZIEST video of you on YouTube! [URL]”

“Wow, 24 people are viewing my Twitter profile right now! Find out how many are on yours [URL]”

“I spent 167 hours on Twitter. Find your number now! [URL]”

Sound familiar? Make you shudder? These are the tweets of spammers, spreading once every few weeks through Twitter like a disease. But they’re also pretty compelling, and sound almost legitimate, especially when they’re tweeted from a friend’s account. And that’s because they have years, and years, and years of practice to get it just right.

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The roots of spam, which is the use of electronic systems to send unsolicited, bulk messages, can be traced back to the mid 1990s, when the internet first started to become affordable to the general public.

Beginning with email, spam rapidly spread to new technologies, such as instant messaging, newsgroups and mobile phones. As social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter became increasingly popular, spam quickly found a new home.

Numbers are on the rise, too. Last year, the estimated figure for total spam messages sent  across all technologies was seven trillion. But what is social media spam, and how can you spot it?

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