Twitter spam can be quite a problem when you tend to follow people back out of courtesy.  There are literally tons of bots and fake accounts out there who are merely interested in selling you dodgy pharmaceutical goods, and questionable MLM schemes.  Here are the top 10 free tools for dealing with Twitter Spam. 

1. How to sniff out potential spammers

TwitBlock is a web app which scans your entire twitter base and provides ‘spam ratings’ to each follower and sorts them according to accounts which are most likely spam.  You can then easily check on their account & block them right away they are spammers. 

2. How to quickly delete DMs from spammers

Spammers have a terrible tendency to either send your auto-DMs or flood your DM inbox.  What you can do to combat this, is to use DM Deleter, a simple bookmarklet and quickly remove all DMs from any given user.

3. How to automatically grade your twitter followers

It’s often too troublesome to analyze each and every follower to determine if they are legit.  TweetBlocker is a tool which grades all your followers based on likelyhood of spam so you can quickly zoom down to certain lower grades (eg. F grade followers) and block them all at once.

4. How to detect and unfollow inactive accounts

Technically this isn’t spam, but inactive followers just adds to clutter.  If they’re not going to say anything on Twitter, why bother following them?  UnTweeps helps you list down all the accounts which hasn’t tweeted recently (you can define this range), and allows you to instantly unfollow them.

5. How to not get spam – a preventive measure

Twit-etiquette be damned, if you don’t know the person, you shouldn’t be obliged to follow them back.  This unwritten common courtesy rule of following someone back made sense back in the day when Twitter was small and relatively pure.  Now, this behavior just makes you an easy target for spammers who just want to you mutually follow each other to push products on you.

6. How to analyze your followers properly

If you’re going to report someone as a spammer on twitter, you may at least want to check their profile out first. Tweetpi Geeky Cleanup has one of the most comprehensive follower stats I’ve ever seen.  From how many replies a user has sent (to measure interaction), to the links tweeted ratio (to avoid ramblers), to the number of times they were retweeted by others(to measure credibility), you really get a full suite of info at your disposal.

7. How to manage the people you’re following

While some services focus on analyzing follwers, Twerpscan analyzes both followers and people you’re following and allows you to bulk block and unfollow people you think are spammers based on their usage patterns.

8. How to search Twitter and get clean results

The problem with searching for popular twitter topics is that spammers also know what the popular topics are, and tend to use their hashtags in their tweets just for the sake of showing up in other people’s searches. 

You can get cleaner results by using Clean Tweets, a Firefox extension which eliminates twitter search results from accounts less than 24 hours old, those with have several hashtags, and allows you to ban people altogether from search results.

9. How to monitor Twitter topics without being overwhelmed by spam

Tidytweet is a twitter search and feed monitoring service which works a lot like Clean Tweets, but is much more flexible.  It allows you to create customized RSS searches, and allows you to to automatically remove all retweets, @replies, foreign language tweets, tweets from new accounts, and tweets with multi-hastags.

10. How to report spam to twitter

This is perhaps one of the most direct ways to deal with spam.  You can either report a spammer by going to his profile and clicking ‘report as spammer’ on the right sidebar, or you can also send a DM to the @spam twitter account and it will help you take care of things.  This method works best when you’re reporting people on an adhoc basis because most of the tools above involve bulk actions.

How do you deal with Twit-spam?  Tell us in the comments :)

People say Twitter is a time waster. I think it depends on how you use it. One awesome opportunity to turn this "time waster" into something really useful is to learn to save money using this platform.

3 Ways to Find the Most Tweeted Deals

The following services work the way we are used to by now: the fresher the deal is and the more votes it gets, the more popular it becomes. Most popular deals end up hitting the front page – that’s the way Digg and Reddit as well as smaller social voting sites work, and this is a great way to save money.

CheapTweet, CouponTweet and TweetMeSavings work this way. People submit and up-vote the deals by Tweeting them. Deals are grouped by category and seller name. You can tweet any of them right from the service page.

2 Ways to Take Advantage of Bots that Tweet to Save Money

There are two Tweeting bots I am aware of that allow to search and compare prices without even leaving Twitter. TinyMassive works like this: you tweet your product name and include @TinyMassive into the message. In a few seconds you get a public reply containing:

1. Your @Twitter-username;
2. The requested product name;
3. The minimum price found;
4. The link to product search results for more options.

Retrevoq is another similar twitter bot to consider.

3 Accounts You Should Follow to Save Money

Many of coupon code directories and aggregators are on Twitter already, so keeping track of deals and coupons may be done directly from there. I for one do it the following way:

1. I use Seesmic desktop app that allows to add and aggregate several Twitter accounts;
2. I create a separate account to follow all my money-saving accounts, and whenever there’s an update, I get a pop-up update: never miss a deal!

Here are a couple of recommended Twitter accounts that daily tweet coupons and deals and helps you save money:

• @CheapStingy (by CheapStingyBargains)
• @WiseBread (by WiseBread.com)
• @BabyCheapskate (by BabyCheapSkate.com)

5 Twitter Hashtags Your Should Track to Save Money

A hashtag is the way to organize Tweets by topic. To monitor a hashtag, you can either use a desktop app (like Tweetdeck or Seesmic) or use web-based tools like "What the Hashtag?". The best money-saving hashtags to keep track of are:

• #bargains;
• #coupon;
• #coupons;
• #freebie;
• #freebie

What other interesting ways do you save money using Twitter?  Tell us in the comments!

Twitter is already a social networking phenomena in its own right and every other person who has an active online presence also seems to be tweeting.  Rather than posting directly on twitter.com’s default web interface, here are 6 ways to become a quicker and more effective tweeter, just by tweaking your web browser.

1. How to tweet URLs and post to del.icio.us with one click

 Bigtweet allows you to share websites you visit by clicking a bookmarklet which automatically puts the URL which you’re currently browsing into your tweet and shortens it for you.  It also posts to del.icio.us and/or Ping.fm so you can even share the URL easily across other social networks.

2. How to tweet URLs and enter contests at the same time

Much like BigTweet, TwitThis also automatically puts the URL which you’re currently browsing into your tweet and shortens it for you.  The unique spin here is that you’re able to enter contests as well, which allow you to tweet and win cool prizes at the same time like iPhones and Kindles.

3. How to tweet even faster

With Twitlet, one can tweet just by hitting a bookmarklet on your browser.  No installation, no browser extensions, just a simple bookmark, and a window pops up where you put in your dose of 140 characters without having to load twitter.  It’s really one of the quickest ways to tweet from a browser.  No sign-up required.

4. How to tweet directly from the Firefox address bar

Twitterbar is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to post tweets fright from the address bar! Just type in any text you want and press the tweet button. Also convenient for tweeting URLs, in which you just have to press the tweet button.

5. How to integrate Twitter into your Firefox sidebar

Self-proclaimed ‘best twitter addon for Firefox’, Twitbin allows users to do anything Twitter-related (send/receive updates, messages etc.) right from the Firefox sidebar. Pretty handy if you are sidebar junkie.

6. How to share links and track them on Twitter

If you use the Bit.ly sidebar to post links to Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail, you’ll also be able to see how popular the link is on bit.ly by being able to track the clicks it gets.  You’ll also be able to read all existing twitter and friendfeed conversations surrounding the link you’re sharing.

This post was jointly written by Chan Huey Hoong and James Yeang

What tips do you have for Twitter productivity? Tell us in the comments!