How to Cut Down on Twitter Spam

There are growing issues and complaints about Twitter spam, and how it’s starting to dominate and clog up your daily stream of updates. Here are some tips on how to avoid and reduce Twitter spam.

1. The easiest approach is simply not auto-following people who start following you. Sure, it’s easy, convenient and apparently polite but it gives you no control about who is actually worth following.

Chris Brogan, a well-known social media consultant, just announced he’s no longer going to auto-follow because he’s getting swamped by spam – a major move for someone who has and courts a huge following.

2. Sign up for a service such as Twimailer, which sends notifications via e-mail that provide details about new followers such as their name, location, Web site, number of followers/friends and their most recent updates. (Note: Factory Joe has a good post on how to make Twimailer more secure.)

A similar service is Twittfilter, which lets you pre-define the follower notifications you want to receive. Using a star rating of one to five, Twittfilter will only sends notifications of new followers that meet how many stars you selected.

Then, there’s Topify, which gives you information about new followers, as well as the ability to follow back replying, reply to direct messages by e-mail, and easily follow and unfollow people. Topify but it looks good, but it’s still in private beta so you need to sign up for an invitation.

For more these notification services, check out Louis Gray’s blog post.

3. Use a spam blocking service such as Twitchuck, which lets you submit someone’s username to see if they’re legit. Twitchuck also offer TwitBlock, a 99 cents/month service that promises to block spammers from your account. Twitchuck was developed by Tim Myers.

There’s another service also called TwitBlock that has a nice, user-friendly interface that makes it easy to block followers.

Another option is Twerp Scan, which goes through your followers then compute the ratio between how many friends/followers they have – theory being that spammers follow thousands of people but have few friends. The downside is the blocking process is manual as you have to through each user.

Finally, there’s TweetBlocker, which seems easy to use. (Note: ReadWriteWeb has a review on TweetBlocker – nice to see a major blog cover something after Twitterrati!)

4. Report spammers to Twitter. You can do it by blocking spammers when they follow you. Or you can follow Twitter’s spam account, and send it a direct message with a spammer’s username.

Any other tools and techniques worth checking out to block or reduce Twitter spam?

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