No offense if your avatar looks like any of these Twitter avatars on the right – but when I was glancing through my Twitter followers and saw these photos (now, I didn’t post any of the avatars that were just straight porn – of which there were a few) – it only took me a second to realize they were spam.
And perhaps you don’t mind having spam/bot followers on Twitter. But for some reason – it really irritates me. So I go through and clean out my spam followers from time to time. And those girls on the right? Yah. All spam.
It’s not too hard to figure out if you’re being followed by someone who isn’t a real person. Here is an example of a very obvious Twitter spam account:
How can you tell if someone who is following you is spam or not? Take a look at the above profile:
- Cute photo with a username like “bact78e5.” What in the world does that even mean?
- The Name (GeorEllen) doesn’t really connect with the username or photo at all – and doesn’t really match what you’d expect to see in the photo.
- A disproportionate amount of people “she’s” following, as opposed to who is following her. If someone is following 1,ooos of people and only has 5 followers – it’s probably spam.
- Inane tweets. Look at her tweets – they don’t really even make any sense…
- Tweets come from API. Normally tweets will come from “web” or “text” or Tweetie or Tweetdeck (whatever program the person is using). When they’re just straight using the API (like above) – while I don’t fully understand what that means – it is another clue that it is probably a spam follower.
Anyway – normally it’s pretty obvious to see if something is spam. But in case you’re not 100% sure, I hope these tips have helped.
