Top 10 Twitter Tips & Tools for Fighting Spam

• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

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 :)