Yikes! Just within the last few days I’ve been getting a massive number of folks following me on twitter that all claim to be the world’s best online marketing guru, personal trainer, health adviser, or some other crack-pot get-rich-quick multi-level-marketing schemer. I’ve been blocking them but I wanted to throw the question out there and see what other people do. I know these are just spam, fake accounts, and probably robots.
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I’ve just voted to block them having just blocked half a dozen or so this morning. With any luck a few people doing that will trigger Twitter’s filters and they’ll get suspended. I had some a couple of days ago which, when I went to look, were already suspended so there’s obviously some mechanism to get rid of them.
Here’s my rule of thumb developed through vast experience over the last few days
– if they’re following more than 500 people and aren’t obviously saying something of immediate interest then they’re spammers and need to be stamped on. Ones that aren’t immediately interesting but seem like real people are welcome to follow if they like, of course.
What I don’t understand with these spammers is how they have such a lot of followers. Do some people automatically follow back irrespective of whether the content looks interesting or have they set up sock-puppet accounts to follow to make themselves look interesting? Maybe a bit of both, perhaps.
Thanks Ed. Sounds like a logical solution.
I’m a bit baffled too why spammers would think spending all this effort following real people is worthwhile. Twitter seems so well setup to thwart this with the blocking feature. I also just don’t see how they’d make money. They’d need millions of followers to make their efforts worthwhile… or so it would seem.
Personally… I’d rather have 100 real people following me than 10,000 robots or schemers.
Thanks guys, I have been asking myself this question over the last two days. I have had 50 or more “people” follow me in two days and I can only assume it’s spam. I am following the same method as Ed – block spam, follow those who are interesting and let un-interesting people follow that seem to be real people. I like the look of your blog Michael, can’t wait to explore further.
Thanks Paul.
I ha another thought too… I wonder if a couple of these very large tweeps is the culprit… like selling their list of followers to the junior spammers. I’m going to do some more blocking and see if cutting the cancer helps.