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 :)
I have a list of spam I’ve reported and if I find out later the accounts are clearly still being used as spam accounts, I file tickets to twitter support.
Hi,
Thnk you …useful article .
Best regards !
This is a great post. It helps me a lot, Thanks
I use TwitSweeper.com, which gets rid of your spammy or undesirable followers automatically, although you can review/confirm what it finds first, or have it “just do it” on your behalf. It keeps checking and cleaning your list of follows on an ongoing basis.
thats great. thanks
Thanks for the tips. I was hacked this morning and received 25 messages to tell me and lost 25 followers as a result.
Have changed password and will be more vigilant now and employ some of your tactics….
I re-tweeted this ! great information, spamming really sucks, and very irritating, this tips helps to control over spam little beat.
Regarding #2 DM Deleter is not working at the moment.
There exists two major ways to prevent DM Spam:
1. Use SocialOomph’s ( http://www.socialoomph.com ) opt out plan.
2. Use Social.too ‘s ( http://socialtoo.com ) opt out plan.
Go to both sites, read the FAQs regarding not receiving auto-DMs and one prevents >80% of DM spam.
Great ideas, going to put these to good use.
Nice little list, I checked **Twitblock** and unfortunately I found the algorithm they use too basic, or maybe it’s just my standard where I consider obsessive product and affiliate promoters as spammers as well … are there any sites that scan for users like this?
I would love to know such sites, and I would hope that more twitter users think like me, seeing someone posts 3 times the same link to their affiliate link in 1-2 days is no fun for me.
Hello pixl_dave… In answer to your question, I’d suggest trying twitsweeper.com — it has much more detailed criteria to detect undesirable followers….
Thank you Doug, I’ll have to check up on twistsweeper, although I feel bad for some of the sugestions that these tools gave, where an honest dude that just started out with low followers count but with a higher following count, got a bad score, and those that are indeed spammy, got great scores and no one complained about them …
Re pixl_dave …. I know that twitsweeper.com doesn’t use “follower/following ratios”, or “hasn’t tweeted for N days” to make its decisions… it looks at actual info on the account and the user’s actual tweets to make an “educated assessment” of each follower based upon a number of data points. Anyway, if interested you might want to see what you think….