Today I read a post about Why Twitter Is Dead. RIP Twitter. (The Atlantic: A Eulogy for Twitter) And it got me a bit mad. And I went through my process of weeding and whacking TweeSpammers. Using my two favorite tools Manageflitter and TwitBlock.org. But I feel like we tweeters and tweet-leaders have some responsibility to give the average social media newbie and enthusiast a few things they can do to stem the tide and push back the death knell.

First let’s look at some of the less obvious offenders that showed up in my Followers. [Aside: Why would you want to Report and Block some of your Followers, I mean, isn’t it all a numbers game? I want more Followers, not fewer. Let’s address that in a second.]

The "blank" spammer that follows you.

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The "foreign" spammer, that has very little bio data and often pictures of cute women.

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The "buy followers" spammer. Notice the suggestive profile image.

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The "almost real" spammer. (Nice header image, foreign name, picture of a smiling woman.)

Okay, so I’m suggesting you spend time using the Report and Block option on these followers, thus reducing your follower count. Why?

1. Reporting and blocking a spammer account gives Twitter-corp and some of the other de-spamming tools some information about the good or bad nature of the account. Enough blocks and reports and Twitter-corp (though very infrequently) might shutdown the account. More likely, is a service like TwitBlock.org will register another negative mark against this account and make it easier for future users to block them.
2. Cleaning up your followers and removing spammers makes your Twitter account more realistic. The only VALUE of a Twitter follower is when they actually take action on something you Tweet. Primarily the hope is a follower would click on a link if the information you are tweeting about it relevant to them. If you have a lot of bots, they don’t do anything. They are dead accounts.
3. Punching spammers in the face is not possible, so blocking and reporting them is.
4. Push back the eulogy for Twitter and keep some of the value alive.

Here are my previous attempts to ID and evangelise this process of killing spam accounts and why they are bad.

• Twitter Bot Network Invades Social Media for Business: How BotNets Work
• Buy Twitter Followers? Um, Why Not, and What Are These Scammers Doing?
• The Problem with Twitter.com; Why Are Tweeters Dropping Like Flies?
• How to Fix Twitter < But Twitter Won’t Do It
• Auto-Bots Are Killing Twitter; Why Auto-Social & Robot-Social is Bad
• You’ve Been TweeSpamed: How To Recognize the Scammers on Twitter
• Twitter Porn, Twitter Spam, Twitter Bot Networks, Twitter Hacks – What I Think They’re Doing

Everything Twitter related can be found on The Twitter Way page.

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2014/05/twitter-is-dead/

Check out the Digital Strategist’s Notebook page for other posts about learning social media

Tools and References

• A Eulogy for Twitter – The Atlantic
•  Manageflitter
•  TwitBlock.org

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