10 ways to identify a Twitter Spammer

If you are using twitter the Twitter Spammers will come and get you. This article will help you find them so that you can block them from your account. Unfortunately this will be an ongoing process as with all anti spam activities.

You’ll soon learn to spot them, if you suspect there is something dodgy about a new follower you’re probably right.

Why do the Twitter Spammers Do it?

Because there are some people who feel it is only polite to follow everyone that follows you. This is clearly not a good idea; clearing out the not so useful people you have inadvertently followed will be yet another ongoing  job so liberally following useless or nefarious twitters in the first place is a complete waste of time and energy. Also, you only want to follow people who are going to post messages that will at least occasionally interest you, why would you want to subscribe to a load of old spam? Well some people still do it, so for Twitter Spammers there is a very good chance that they will get at least 10% of say 30 000 people they start following to follow them back, that’s 3 000 followers. If you are one of those followers the spammer’s links show up on your stream and you are contributing to their free advertising campaign. Auto-follow is therefore not the best tool to use.

How do you recognise a Twitter Spammer?

A Twitter Spammer:

1. Might be relatively new but be following thousands
2. Number of posts can often be weak as main objective is to get you to follow a particular URL
3. Their description may be something like Start Earning Money Now: Income for Life — Start Earning Money
4. Often uses a sexy young girl showing a fair bit of flesh for their profile picture (not all sexy young girls are spammers though!)
5. Their username may be made up of a string of random characters
6. Their web link is usually a shortened one using Bitly or Tinyurl
7. They may use a famous name and just adapt it a little like michaeljjackson
8. They may pretend to be an established online guru
9. Won’t have many people replying back. You can use Twitter Search check this out
10. May tweet only links and provide very little conversation outside of their regular updates. Be careful though as many good sites tweet mainly links, those who are reputable and tweet ongoing news and information like us for example!

Twitter have an API (application programming interface) available that allows techies to develop really useful tools to make using their application better. Carlo Zottman has created a very useful tool called Twitter Twerp Scan to help you weed out these annoying Twitter Spammers. TwitBlock is another  new tool designed to help you get rid of any spammers. Although it isn’t not 100% accurate you are given the choice to click on the contact and decide for yourself.

Similar resources you may like

1. Managing Social Media Networks
2. #FF – Do you Follow Friday? Poll Results Write Up
3. Tweeting in a nutshell – What to tweet and how often
4. Twitter Marketing: the best Twitter apps
5. Download Free Professional Twitter Background

Tags

Block Twitter Spam, finding twitter spammers, How do you recognise a Twitter Spammer, how to identify twitter spammers, identify twitter spammers, twitter, twitter spammers

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