Recent Posts

Money Makers

Subscribe

  • Subscribe
  •  

    TwitterCounter for @chrisjacobsontwitter / chrisjacobsonChris Jacobson on FacebookChris Jacobson on YouTube

Do You Auto-Follow Spammers and Bots on Twitter?

February 2nd, 2009 posted by · 4 Comments

When it comes to Twitter, I try to follow as many people who follow me, but sometimes it gets overwhelming. If I’m following someone that shoots out their RSS feed every 30 minutes because that’s how often they post to their blog, I tend to un-follow them. If I’m following someone that simply uses Twitter to shamelessly promote their website or affiliate product every chance they get, I tend to also un-follow them.

For a while I had my account set to auto-follow new followers using a service called TweetLater.com. I soon had to shut this off because I found myself following spammers and bots. This ended up causing my screen to be filled with advertisements and other non-solicited messages. While most of these accounts eventually got suspended in a few hours, or sometimes a few days, it was very annoying.

Not only did the messages take my time away from seeing legitimate tweets from those that I follow, but it wasted a lot of my time to weed out the junk. Thankfully, the team at TweetLater.com has come up with a solution. TweetLater now keeps a new follower on hold for 72 hours so that you can log into their website and decide on whether you really want to follow that person or not. If you don’t respond within 72 hours, the website will go ahead and apply your selected automation options.

TweetLater

When you log in, you’ll see three options for each new follower: A) approve B) ignore, or C) block.

If you have more than one Twitter account linked to TweetLater, you can vet new followers for all of those accounts on one page.

There’s a quick tip to crack down on your Twitter spam! 🙂



Tweet This Tweet This Post!
Posted under Social Networking · 4 Comments Like this article? Subscribe to our RSS feed
4 Comments so far
  1. pet snakes MyAvatars 0.2
    February 3rd, 2009 at 12:44 pm

    Thanks for the tip. I tried a few different automation services and found I prefer to just “twit” manually. Takes more time, but I avoid the spam. Of course I don’t get thousands of follows a day. If I did that might change my mind.

  2. Sire MyAvatars 0.2
    February 4th, 2009 at 12:14 am

    I’m not a great fan of Twitter but I do use it. I have a small following and usually only tweet if I have found something interesting. I use a plugin on two of my blogs that automatically tweets a new post, but that is about it. I don’t tweet when I burp, fart, have a coffee or any other useless information, something that I notice a lot of people doing.

  3. Leo dimilo MyAvatars 0.2
    February 5th, 2009 at 12:47 pm

    Thanks for the tip….Spammers and auto-followers can easily be rooted out. All you have to do is look at the profile and see where their URL will take you…if it is a sales page, I won’t bother.

  4. skyje MyAvatars 0.2
    February 19th, 2009 at 3:28 pm

    Wow, thanks for the information. I always wondered were everyone was getting the u comment I follow badge. Thanks for sharing.