Twitter spam could be quite a problem whenever you tend to follow people back out of courtesy. There are literally tons of bots and fake accounts out there who are merely interested in selling you dodgy pharmaceutical goods, and questionable MLM schemes. Here are the top 10 free tools for dealing with Twitter Spam.
1. How to sniff out potential spammers
TwitBlock is really a web app which scans your whole twitter base and provides ‘spam ratings’ to each follower and sorts them according to accounts which are most likely spam. You can then very easily check on their account & block them right away they are spammers.
2. How to quickly delete DMs from spammers
Spammers have a terrible tendency to either send your auto-DMs or flood your twitter DM inbox. What you can do to combat this, is to use DM Deleter, a simple bookmarklet and quickly remove all DMs from any given user.
3. How to automatically grade your twitter followers
It’s often too troublesome to analyze each and every twitter follower to determine if they are legit. TweetBlocker is really a tool which grades all your followers based on likelyhood of spam so you are able to quickly zoom down to certain lower grades (egg. F grade followers) and block them all at once.
4. How to detect and unfollow inactive accounts
Technically this isn’t spam, but an inactive follower just adds to clutter. If they’re not going to say anything on Twitter, why bother following them? UnTweeps helps you list down all the twitter accounts which hasn’t tweeted recently (you can define this range), and allows you to instantly unfollow them.
5. How to not get spam – a preventive measure
Twitter etiquette be damned, if you don’t know the person, you shouldn’t be obliged to follow them back. This unwritten common courtesy rule of following someone back made sense back in the day when Twitter was small and relatively pure. Now, this behavior just makes you an easy target for spammers who just want to you mutually follow every other to push products on you.
6. How to analyze your followers properly
If you’re going to report someone as a spammer on twitter, you may at least want to check their profile out first. Tweetpi Geeky Cleanup has one of the most comprehensive follower stats I’ve ever seen. From how many replies a user has sent (to measure interaction), to the links tweeted ratio (to avoid ramblers), to the number of times they were retweeted by others (to measure credibility), you really get a full suite of info at your disposal.
7. How to manage the people you’re following
While some services focus on analyzing followers, Twerpscan analyzes both followers and people you’re following and allow you to bulk block and unfollow individuals you think are spammers based on their usage patterns.
8. How to search Twitter and get clean results
The problem with searching for popular twitter topics is that spammers also know what the popular topics are, and tend to use their hashtags in their tweets just for the sake of showing up in other people’s searches.
You are able to get cleaner results by using Clean Tweets, a Firefox extension which eliminates twitter search results from twitter accounts less than 24 hours old, those with have several hashtags, and allows you to ban people altogether from search results.
9. How to monitor Twitter topics without being overwhelmed by spam
Tidytweet is really a twitter search and feed monitoring service which works a lot like Clean Tweets, but is much more flexible. It allows you to create customized RSS searches, and allows you to automatically remove all retweets, @replies, foreign language tweets, tweets from new accounts, and tweets with multi-hastags.
10. How to report spam to twitter
This is perhaps one of the most direct ways to deal with spam. You are able to either report a spammer by going to his profile and clicking ‘report as spammer’ on the right sidebar, or you are able to also send a DM to the @spam twitter account and it will help you take care of things. This method works best when you’re reporting individuals on an adhoc basis because most of the tools above involve bulk actions.