Being a good neighbour on Twitter

It’s easy to end up accumulating a large number of “spam”* followers on Twitter (i.e. accounts which only pump out marketing messages, often using @ replies on completely unrelated topics and sometimes using dubious links to con you in to going to dubious sites).

Does it matter? Well, in the short term if anything it’s a bonus for the cynical – because it boosts your follower numbers, making you look more popular and boosting your ratings on various Twitter grading services.

But we’ll all lose out if Twitter is over-run by spam. Removing spam followers reduces the value of the spam account (the fewer people who are following it, the lower the monetary value for selling the opportunity to send messages via it). Blocking spam followers also helps highlight to Twitter itself which accounts may need closing down. In addition, the smaller the number of people who follow a spam account, the more obvious it is to other people that it is a spam account. Seeing an account follows 1,402 people but is only followed by 7 immediately gives a pretty big clue this may well be an account to steer clear of.

So although it doesn’t bring immediate reward, removing spammers from your list of followers is a sensible piece of good neighbouring.

However, keeping on top of spam followers isn’t always easy. Looking out for new followers who you don’t recognise but have avatars showing scantily dressed young women it usually a pretty strong tip, but it takes time and isn’t infallible or all-encompassing.

So I’ve been trying out http://twitsweeper.com which looks promising and although only free for a trial period, it is cheap after that. I’d recommend you give it a go.

With a bit of luck, one of the changes we’ll see in 2010 is more and more of the Twitter grading schemes penalising people who have a large number of spammy followers – so encouraging more people to take action against spam on Twitter.

* I’ve put spam in quote marks because, when it comes to email, in my book there’s a genuine difference between marketing emails which meet all the relevant rules and laws and messages which are actual spam, even if the word is often used by people to describe the former. On Twitter the distinction is more blurred, though there’s still a difference (especially when talking about accounts which simply pump out marketing information, but don’t use disguised URLs, inappropriate @ replies or hash tags etc.). In practice, though, these are usually lumped together, and the various anti-spam Twitter services I’ve seen don’t distinguish between them.