TwitSweeper Sweeps Spam Away

Twitter spam continues to be a huge problem, and there’s no sign that it’s going to disappear any time soon. This problem has created a huge opportunity for companies offering anti-spam services.

For the past month, I’ve been using TwitSweeper, which examines your followers to see if any of them are “spammy”, and then lets you to quickly remove and block them. TwitSweeper determines spam by matching someone’s Twitter information (bio, screen name, Web site and last tweet) against a library of keywords. For example, someone who has “Work From Home” in their bio would be identified by TwitSweeper as a spammer.

So far, my experience with TwitSweeper has been excellent. Setting up Twitter accounts takes little time, the user-interface is clean and intuitive, and the process to review, remove and block followers identified as spam is quick and easy.

TwitSweeper works with multiple Twitter accounts, which can be managed separately or as one entity. Unlike most Twitter-related services, the Waterloo, Ont.-based company charges for its services if you decide to continue after a 17-day free trial period. The packages include:

- Platinum: up to 20 accounts and one million to five million followers ($99/year)
- Gold: up to 15 accounts, and 100,000 to one million followers ($49/year)
- Silver: up to 10 accounts, and 10,000 to 100,000 followers ($29/year)
- Bronze: up to five accounts, and up to 10,000 followers ($19/year)

While the packages are reasonable, the key will be getting people to understand why they need anti-spam protection and why using the service is worth the investment. Without a doubt, this will be the major marketing and sales challenge if TwitSweeper wants to make enough revenue to become a viable company.

While people don’t see Twitter spam as that big of a problem, particularly if they don’t auto-follow, there’s definitely a small group of Twitter users that could use a high-quality anti-spam tool. In particular, businesses should find TwitSweeper an attractive and cost-efficient way to manage followers.

Here’s the TwitSweeper dashboard that provides an overview of your accounts and activity:

Here’s what you see after TwitSweeper identifies “spam” followers:

And here’s the information that TwitSweeper provides for each suspected spammer:

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