How to Stop Twitter Spam

Twitter spam is a real problem. and it is getting worse.

You may think you have a loyal following of people who find you interesting, or amusing, but they’re probably not all real people. Among your followers will be a wide spectrum of fully automated, or computer aided Twitter accounts.

If you manually vet your Twitter followers then the chances are you would have little or no spam followers. However, if you have some sort of auto-follow enabled on your Twitter account(s), then chances are you would have a lot of spam followers.

An auto-follow is when someone follows you, you automatically follow them back. There are plenty of auto-following services out there.. my post on SocialOomph (previously known as TweetLater) covers how to setup an auto-follow.

Until Twitter come up with an official solution, then the best way to deal with Twitter spam is to use a third party anti-spam tool.

TwitBlock is one such service that I have found to be very easy to use. TwitBlock is a junk filter and bulk blocking tool for Twitter users.

From the TwitBlock homepage, click on <Scan For Spam>,

When the authorisation request appears, click on <Allow>,

TwitBlock will now scan your followers for signs of spamminess.. this may take a while depending on how many followers you have,

When the scan is finished you will see a list of your followers.. with the most likely spam accounts displayed at the top of the list.

Each account that is listed will have a score next to it. There is no limit to the actual score, it is just used to order the list from high to low. A score doesn’t guarantee an account is spam, it’s just a relative indicator, and a non-zero score doesn’t mean the account is black-listed in any way.

The score is worked out using various factors associated with spam and nuisance accounts. If you analyse a single account you will see a verbal description of the indicators that have been applied.

The analysis performed looks for common indicators of spam. Sometimes real people and legitimate companies will display the same characteristics, but the real problem accounts come up with scores well into the thousands. Through continued development we intend for the scanner to become more accurate, but it is unlikely to replace your brain, so take a good look before you block.

Click on analyse,

Some details of this Twitter account will display.

You will have to use your judgement here as not every account that is listed is spam.

In this case, the username is @ZdACfU which to me, doesn’t seem like an authentic username. Also, it tells me that this same photo has been used on 324 other accounts that people have blocked.. which is a trait almost unique to spam accounts.

To block this account, simply click on block,

Done!

That’s all it takes to analyse your Twitter followers and block those accounts that are most likely spam.

Related posts:

1. Bulk unfollow people on Twitter with Twitter Karma
2. 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers
3. CoTweet Guide to using Twitter for Business
4. How to Setup Multiple Twitter Accounts with One Email Address
5. Remote Control your PC with Twitter
6. Send iPhone Videos to Twitter using TwitterFon and TwitVid
7. The Twitter Guide Book