3 Strategies For Preventing Spam on Your Twitter Account
When Twitter first emerged onto the market, it was an exclusive center for tech geeks and social networking addicts. As more people joined it became a more mainstream medium and it is now largely populated by celebrities and large companies, who are responsible for a great deal of the overall traffic. Unfortunately, with this kind of market penetration, Twitter has also fallen prey to bots, spammers, and annoying internet marketers. Although its growth is a welcome one, many of Twitters early members still long for the old days when transmissions were pure and free.
Nobody likes an e-mail inbox full of junk, but the new forms of social media has created a wider and more efficient form of spam that makes it even more difficult to appreciate your favorite sites. For instance, there once was a time when you would simply receive mail and you could easily and automatically trash it, but now you can be convinced or tricked to “follow” someone on Twitter that leads you to an onslaught of affiliate links. Problems like this can be very frustrating and can bring you to nearly cancelling your account. However, here are a few strategies that you can use to lessen some of the impact.
1) Wait it out. Perhaps the most commonly used trick of the automated Twitter bots is to follow you so that you will return the favor and follow them. If you have ever used MySpace then you are familiar with how accepting “Friend Requests” from strangers can lead to a full inbox of spam, or obnoxious irrelevant bulletin postings. Sometimes, when some follows you on Twitter, if you simply do nothing they will go away. Even if they come back and try to follow you again, you can compare the old notifications with the new ones to see if the names or profiles are the same. At this point you can block them if you decide that they are malicious. Twitter’s updated and upgraded notifications have made it very easy to determine which or appropriate for blocking.
2) Look sharp. Because Twitter has a basic framework of profiles, like Facebook, users cannot customize their pages in the same way. This makes it difficult to tell who is who, but if you look closely, you will see that bots often use the same picture or names for hundreds of profiles. If any of the profile pictures of your followers are the same, they are probably the same bot.
3) “Quote, Quote, Link.” This is actually the hardest way to detect a spammer because their account appears to be highly active, but if you look closely you’ll notice that hidden within the quotes are affiliate links that will take you to an MLM or a bot trying to get access to your account info.
You can’t expect social media sites to always stay protected from bots and spammers, especially since their strategy is to allow anyone to set up a page. It’s unfair, though, for spammers to expect that you will tolerate their unwanted solicitations. If you are starting to get fed up with cluttered inboxes, especially on Twitter, you should consider one of these easy strategies to help ease your troubles.
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