We all now how common spammers are on Twitter. Spammers are people that follow you and reply to you with advertisements and things you don’t want. Bots are also common and those are spammers but auto-spammers and those suck even worse. Often times, I’ll simply mention coffee and get a reply within seconds with some promo for free coffee. Yes it’s annoying.
I think a lot of people deal with it because on those random occasions that Twitter purges known spam / bot accounts, people complain heavily about losing followers. “wahhhhh i lost 250 followers!!” I’ll check TwitterCounter.com and yep everyone lost a few hundred followers so it’s going to be okay, I promise.
It’s not often that people opt in to purge their followers but honestly I don’t want a ton of followers. What I want is a rabid group of people who will click, visit and sign up for anything that I tweet about. Having a number isn’t important. it’s about relationships & influence. 100K people that follow me doesn’t mean anything if that link I posted on received 15 clicks. For a guy that had nearly 4,000 followers, a link getting 150 clicks is pretty good. I like that ratio and those links were being clicked days later which shows some people check out things that I tweeted a while ago which is also a good sign.
Personally, I want my follower count to be honest, open and simple with zero spammers / bots. TweetBlocker has helped me out.
You setup your TweetBlocker account w/ Twitter’s OAuth authentication then it spends 10-45 minutes scanning all of your followers. Then, it grades them based on how long ago they joined Twitter, their follow – follower ratio and other data points. Your followers are put into grades like a report card (a,b,c,d and f). Then simply filter by grade, select one or all of those Twitter accounts and click “block”.
After this 5 minute process took place, I lost 862 FOLLOWERS! I did take care to scan the list at least somewhat to make sure I didn’t block my mom who rarely tweets but does follow me. She has a D score and it would have been bad if I blocked her. Here are TwitterCounter.com screenshots from before & after the process.
Head on over to TweetBlocker.com and try it out. Let me know how the process goes and how many spammers you purged!