If you’ve been using Twitter for more than a few months, you’ve likely gained some spammy followers and you’ve also probably ended up following a few people you wish you hadn’t. Though a light Twitter user could clear out these issues by giving their lists a few minutes of scrutiny, a heavy users is going to need some help. That’s where TwitBlock and The Twit Cleaner come in.
Taking on the spammers who follow you does a lot to maintain the quality of Twitter and to maintain your brand’s image. TwitBlock helps you do this by quickly delivering a list of the spammiest people who follow you and giving you the option to block them. Why block instead of unfollow? Let the official Twitter explanation of “block” explain:
Blocking someone instead of removing them means that not only do you not want to follow them, but you want to deny them the ability to follow, send you tweets, and put your account on their lists.
The same explanation goes on to say:
Blocking someone means that you (and your pic) will not appear on the blocked party’s profile page, friends time line, badge, or anywhere else.
So you can see how blocking can help you maintain your brand’s integrity by getting your name and logo off of the lists of a spammer.
Clean-up the people you’re following using this free tool invented by a guy who was simply sick and tired of spam on twitter. The Twit Cleaner explains his reason for creating his product:
…I tried some auto-follow scripts – keyword searching, that kind of thing. They found some great people, but the amount of noise sky rocketed. Finding & removing spammers & other annoyances one at a time just isn’t practical.
For those of you using tools like Tweepi, TwitterMass, or FlashTweet, you’ve probably run in to this problem as well—you’ve found cool people via these tools, but there’s a lot of spammers ruining your Twitter experience.
After using The Twit Cleaner I was pretty amazed by the experience. Once you’ve granted the app permission to scan the list of people you’re following, it goes to work analyzing everything from what links they tweet, how often they tweet, if their tweets are RSS-generated or human-powered, and if they’re using specific keywords that make them likely spammers. Once the app has finished its scanning and analysis, @thetwitcleaner will send you a direct message with a link to your report.
Any suspect users are placed into the “Dodgy Behavior” category, which is broken out into the subcategories:
- Trying to Sell You Crap
- Nothing But Links
- Tweeting The Same Links All The Time
- Other Dodgy Behavior, Now Absent
You’re then presented with grids of user images list under each category, showing you each and every likely offender. You can then click on any icon to “save” a particular account for the coming purge. The only thing left to do at this point is to start the unfollowing. Another direct message will be sent to you letting you know when your “following” numbers will begin to fall.
Cord is the director of new media at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He has been a web developer for over a decade, working with non-profits to rein in their web development costs and grow their online audiences through simple best practices.
