Twitter Spam - How to Kill It

July 17th 2009 7:30 AM Categories: Social Media

The scourge of spam quickly finds its way into every single communication channel possible, from snail mail packed with pizza coupons you will never use, to emails promising million dollar prizes. Spam has now found its way into social media. Twitter’s major weakness today is inability to fight spam and spammers. Facebook and YouTube have been able to do it, so why not Twitter? There could be many reasons, lack of effort and resources being two, but until Twitter resolves the issue, spam is here to stay.

Here are 6 Ways to Eliminate Spam on Twitter:

Just before I get into this list, you should read 3 Ways Scammers are Filling Twitter With Junk by the folks at Mashable, its a great read.

So how to cut down on spam?

1. Be Selective in Who You Follow

You should establish some criteria for who you add on Twitter depending on your objectives. Remember that behind that pretty profile picture could be a cold, lifeless robot with absolutely no emotions.

Take time to explore the person’s profile picture, website, followers, who they follow, description, and their tweets. Unless you’re a spammer yourself, only add people relevant to the Twitter profile you have built.

2. Block Spammers

It may not be practical to filter through every follower or person you will follow, but there is a simple solution. When you receive tweets that sound spammy and contain a link, check out that page. If its is persuading you to buy something you don’t need, the person is most likely a spammer.

Especially in the marketing niche, there are countless accounts spamming about how to gain 30,000 Twitter followers in a few weeks or how to make $100,000 by internet marketing at home.

Use built-in functions on Twitter and other 3rd party platforms to block people you suspect of spamming.

3. Report Twitter Spam

I think its somewhat sad that Twitter’s anti-spam efforts simply involve a block feature AFTER receiving the spam, and an official Anti-Spam Twitter account. These methods still do help however, and are better than nothing.

To report a spammer and have their account suspended or liquidated, follow Twitter’s official Spam Watch profile and send them a direct message indicating who it is. If they are indeed found to be spamming, they will disappear from the Twittersphere.

4. Use TwerpScan

TwerpScan Identifies Twitter spammers on your list using the ratio of people who are their followers to the people they follow. A profile that has very few followers compared to how many people it follows is one indicator of spam. TwerpScan will filter through your Twitter list and notify you of possible spammers, allowing you to take action.

5. Wait

There are still no highly reliable and accurate anti-spam programs for Twitter available. I would have expected something similar to Akismet Anti-Spam which is a very popular and successful tool to eliminate blog comment spam to have come around by now.

Several Twitter platforms are looking to introduce better functionality to fight spam in future releases, I’m not so sure spam is one of Twitter’s priorities. What is needed is a Twitter anti-spam tool with configurable settings to identify spammers. It must be configurable because one person’s spam may be another’s dinner.

6. Build A Solution With Me

I see Twitter’s major weakness being the prevalence of spam, and addressing this issue would add a lot of value to the platform. I also sense a very high demand by users to eliminate this problem, and see Akismet’s success at eliminating blog spam as proof that it can be done by a third party extension.

The ultimate spam program I envision would have configurable settings to identify spammers using the following factors:

A) The ratio of followers to people following
B) Keywords or phrases in the profile description, and the destination pages of any links
C) The content, age, and links contained within the profile website
D) Frequency, content, and links in tweets
E) Number of followers
F) Number of people following
G) The age of the profile

By configuring the above variables, a person using Twitter can get a spam index profile of everyone.

In addition to cutting out spammers, this would be an excellent tool to determine how relevant other people are to you. I was using TweetDeck recently and its recommendations of people to add on Twitter were completely irrelevant.

Successfully creating a solution for Twitter spam would be rewarding for many reasons, but I cannot do it on my own. If you are interested in working on a solution and have programming experience, please Contact Me so that we can work on a solution.

Conclusion

Although there are ways to reduce spam on Twitter, they are manual, time consuming, and have no preemptive capabalities. The Twittersphere is waiting for a solution to liquidate Twitter spam once and for all. The question is, when will it come, and who will create it?

Do you think there is too much spam on Twitter? How do you deal with it? Are there any applications you recommend to fight it?