I’ve recently seen an influx in spam accounts following me on Twitter. And it’s not just the usual amount. Hundreds of spam accounts a day will follow me, only to stop following me a couple days later (I can tell using Qwitter, an unfollow notification service). But these Twitter spammers have made it harder to sift through my new followers to see who’s worth following back.
I could just turn off all notifications and wait for someone to @ reply to me to follow them back, but I like to consider someone for following right when they follow me. However, I’ve learned how to quickly tell if someone is not worth following on Twitter.
1. Spammy Twitter username
Before I even open the Twitter follow notification email, I look at the person’s username. Spam accounts have started using real-sounding names, but you can still see their oftentimes bot-generated usernames in parenthesis. Anything having to do with wealth, income, revenue, IM (stands for Internet Marketing), deal, free, profit, niche, or something similar is usually a Twitter spammer or bot. Someone who is truly an expert in one of these fields will likely use their own name as a user name, and even if not, I’m busy enough to take my chances and just delete. But it’s pretty obvious whose pages here I don’t even have to look at:
2. Lots of followers with few tweets
If you can’t really tell by the username alone that a Twitter account is spam, read the notification email and look at the number of followers. Traditionally, you could tell a bot/spammer by seeing if someone was following a lot of people but only had a few followers. But the bots and spammers using autofollow scripts are getting smarter; they’re now better at being followed back by other bots/spammers, so their accounts looks more legit. But you can still tell they’re a Twitter spammer if they have thousands of followers but very few tweets.
Unless you’re a celebrity or some sort, you don’t get thousands of followers from just 11 tweets. Even if our Darren here really is a real person rather than a bot, I don’t want to be following someone on a mission to get as many followers as they can as soon as possible.
3. Multiple identical spammy tweets
Posting the same tweet over and over again, or even putting a different spin on the same exact link, is a dead giveaway that someone is a spammer or too overly-promotional to be worth following.
4. No replies
If a Twitter user is only posting links or all tweets without replying to anyone, even if they’re not spammy or self-promotional tweets, they’re probably not worth following because they’re never going to interact with you. So unless you find their content really interesting, don’t follow them back.
5. No retweets
Sometimes the self-promotional people will answer questions directed about them about their product, or will seek people via Twitter Search to see who might be interested in their product, so they might seem to interact a lot of Twitter. But if you go back a few pages and find zero retweets, they might not be worth following back. Retweeting is a core Twitter function that allows people to easily share content besides their own. Building these relationships and sharing interesting content is an important aspect of Twitter. So if you’re trying to keep your Twitter list clean, focus on following people who share.
6. All inspirational quotes
I’ll never figure this one out. It’s ok to throw in an inspirational quote here and there. But there are some spam/weird/I don’t know what to call them accounts that PURELY tweet inspirational quotes. They don’t retweet, they don’t reply, they don’t even self-promote. I don’t get it, but if that’s your thing, then go right ahead and follow. But if you’re looking to follow people you can actually interact with, just move along.
7. Very sporadic tweets
If someone follows you but they don’t have very active accounts, i.e. they only tweet everyone few weeks or months, they may not be worth adding to your following count unless they’re a friend in real life. If you still find their content interesting, a good solution would be to create a private list for individuals who aren’t very active on Twitter, but you still want to keep tabs on. You can call the list “Lazy Tweeps” or something.
8. Missing a Twitter icon
People want to be able to put a face with a Twitter account. Even if someone doesn’t want to post a picture of themselves, they can at least upload an image of something meaningful to them, like a pet, a cute graphic, or favorite vacation spot, or a mascot. If you’re considering a Twitter account that doesn’t have an icon at all, just one of the generic birds, it might be a bot.
9. Only tweet the mundane
Unlike spammy self-promoters on Twitter, there are others who just have no idea how to use Twitter, and are using it to post every mundane detail of their lives. That’s barely even acceptable on Facebook.
10. They’re not interesting to you
Finally, make a judgment call. If there’s a genuine person who has followed you but only tweets and interacts with others about about tops you have no interest in, don’t feel obligated to follow back. There are plenty other people on Twitter to fill that stream of updates.
What other characteristics would you add to the list for Twitter accounts not worth following?
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Some very important points there, Diana. I would also not add person
1. who follows more people than his followers or
2. has somebody else's photo instead of himself/herself or
3. no useful profile information about him/her or
Good post!
Excellent post, Diana! I really felt like you had read my mind with this post – I instinctively do nearly all of these 10 things when I go through emails of my new followers. Personally I’m pretty strict about who I follow – I want to keep my timeline to a meaningful and reasonable group of people without getting overwhelmed, and so I’m constantly following/unfollowing a handful of people each day to ensure I maximize the value in my Twitter stream. Thus I have a very critical eye for who I follow back.
The only item I might partially disagree with is #5 – I don’t consider retweeting a critical aspect of someone’s Twitter activity. In fact the RWW article on the most influential Twitter users indicated they only retweet ~30% of the time: http://j.mp/aKsQNW There are some folks who simply provide value in other ways, either through original content, unique interactions, etc.
Thanks for commenting, those are good points! People should take the time to fill in the bio to give people some basic info about themselves.
One other quick comment – on #1 spammy twitter usernames, I've started to see more and more cases where the name in theory looks normal, but doesn't at all match the full name on the account. Example: @timKronebusch
That's another good tip of what to look out for. Thanks for commenting!
That's another good tip of what to look out for. Thanks for commenting!