Last week we had our first guest posting here on the WebEden blog. Its was from Alison Cross, a self confessed non-techie webby. As part of our attempts to get to grips with Twitter, Alison discussed how to spot spam on Twitter.

Well Alison is back, and this time she’s talking about how to slice through – and get rid of – spam on Twitter.

How to Slice Through Spam on Twitter

When Sting warbled: ‘I never saw a miracle of science or progress that didn’t turn from a blessing to a curse’, he could have been singing about Twitter.

The handy little micro-blogging tool has rapidly become a magnet for spammers.

What’s a spammer?  The people who keep trying to make you visit sites that you’re not interested in; the people who want you to watch Britney Spears doing something unmentionable with a courgette.

Although Twitter mount regular pogroms against spammers, there are a few things that you can do to slice your spam.

1. Follow @spam. This is Twitter’s own route for rooting out the spam accounts.  When you follow @spam, any Twitter announcements about spam activities will drop into your timeline, allowing you to take their suggested action.

2. Stop hoovering up thousands of followers via advertised apps to artificially boost your popularity – this is a sure-fire way to voluntarily attach yourself to spammers.

Robert Scoble, self-confessed social media addict, had some 7,000 spammy accounts following him. Read his account here.

3. Vet your potential followers by using one of the many Twitter applications available.  I use Tweetlater (if Ken lets me, I’ll come back to evangelise about it!).  This app allows me to block, ignore, accept and report followers as spam.

4. Watch what you tweet! I call this the Law of Twitter Attraction. Out there are millions of tweeters, some just ready to pounce on you if you tweet their magic word.

For example, if you tweet off a complaint to a friend ‘sick of cash generator spam!’  What happens? Yup, you are suddenly followed by a slew of ‘cash generator’ tweeters.

If you have an automatic follow set up, then their tweets will enter your time line, diluting your product/services message and interfering with your conversations.

To combat this, don’t tweet the proper spelling of the trigger word.  Sticking with the above example, I’ve found that if I don’t type ‘cash’, but ‘c4sh’, that will, for now, keep me beneath the spammers’ radar.

Even better, simply adopt the New Age philosophy and only tweet about things that you WANT in your timeline!

Now that we’re nearly at the end of this guest blog, have a think about my definition of what constitutes a spammer.  No, not the Britney/vegetable people, but ‘people who make you visit a site that you’re not interested in’.

If you are not discerning enough with your Twitter marketing campaign, if you contact uninterested twitterers about your product or service….YOU’RE spam.

About Alison Cross

Alison Cross lives on the Isle of Bute where she has built over a dozen websites using our software. She also helps people use Twitter to market their business. For more info or advice, contact see her website alisoncross4webs.co.uk.

Last week we invited everyone to submit articles and ideas for a guest posting on the WebEden blog. To kick it off, we’ve a couple of articles by Alison Cross from AlisonCross4Webs.co.uk on how to spot Spam on Twitter. Over to Alison.

How to spot Spam on Twitter

This is a screen shot from my own new Twitter account.  This area of an account can help you slice your spam.

1    See my ‘friendly web maker’ logo?  Real people load up logos or photos.  Spammers tend to keep the brown double-circle Twitter logo or have a ¾ pose of a really pretty girl. Beware; she may be a spam lure!  Look for additional clues…

2    Look at the yellow bio column, you can see that my followers/following ratio looks reasonable.  Spammers follow thousands of people and have few followers.  The followers they do have are accounts that have an automatic-follow set up, or worse, just other spambots.  Exceptions to this rule are well known names or brands.  Join the hundreds of thousands following Stephen Fry with gay abandon.

3    My postings are a mix of replies, questions and broadcast information. Anyone who just has solely broadcast information MAY just be spam….or a business whom you are following purely for info, not to chat with – eg @bbc @cnn.

Note: Many spammers have no tweets at all.  They are just building up a list to sell off the ‘parked’ twitter account to an advertising company ;-)  Am I sounding cynical?!

4    RT spam (retweeting spam). This is when spammers retweet one of your postings and, because you are flattered that someone thinks you’re so informative or witty that they share your comment with their followers.  You may be tempted to follow them (after all, they have shown some discernment by retweeting YOU!). Don’t be fooled, zip over to their timeline and check the above points – you’ll find that lots of them are spammers.

Finally, don’t block someone just because you can’t see an obvious reason why they would want to follow you. Twitter is about building up links, either for chatting or for business. Not every stranger is a spammer, some of them might turn out to be future customers.  Have fun!

Next week we’ve got the second part of this guest article: How to slice through Spam on Twitter.

About Alison Cross

Alison Cross lives on the Isle of Bute where she has built over a dozen websites using our software. She also helps people use Twitter to market their business. For more info or advice, contact see her website alisoncross4webs.co.uk.