A friend of mine recently set up a Twitter account to help promote his new blog. Within minutes of the account being created he had 45 followers. He was so pleased with this reponse he called me up to tell me about it. I had a look at the list of followers and noticed there was something a little strange about the names of the people who were following him – almost all of his followers were female and every single one of them had a number after their username, for example Jenny734 (which doesn’t exist at the time of writing).
I have been using Twitter for a while and can recognise an obvious spammer straight away, some of the more devious spammers are more difficult to spot, but anyone who has a Twitter username that ends with a number is usually up to no good. Try looking at your own list of followers and take a close look at each of the usernames that ends with a number, you will almost certainly find that the user is fictional.
When I started to put this post together I had a quick look at my follower list to see which of those users could be classed as a bit iffy. I was pretty sure I would find a few, but was quite surprised to find 8 in the first 3 pages (8 out of 30).
Closer inspection revealed a lot of similarities between the accounts with regards to usernames, account usage and the subject matter of the tweets being sent out. I can’t say that every single account I found is being used by a spammer, but I would certainly suggest there is something not quite right about each account, and I would be very suspicious about clicking on links in their tweets and bio’s as they could be taking me to places I don’t want to go to and installing bits of software on my computer I don’t want installed.
These are some of the more obvious ways to spot a Twitter spammer
1) The twitter avatar – if the picture is of a scantily clad blonde (or similar) you can be pretty sure the picture is not that of the person making the tweets and is a surefire sign that the account has been created by someone who is using Twitter for something dodgy.
2) The bio has not been completed or contains claims about making millions of dollars from doing virtually nothing. If it sounds too good to be true it usually is.
3) All tweets are trying to sell something or they are about the same subject. One account I checked had sent 10 tweets in total and each of the tweets offered a solution to getting 100 or 500 new followers in 24 hours.
4) The ‘following to follower’ ratio is out of proportion. They are following hundreds or thousands of people and have very few Twitter users who have followed them in return. This can be expected on celebrity accounts, but not on the account of an average Joe.
4) Every tweet contains a link. A lot of people send links within their tweets so you should use this in conjunction with some of the other pointers above.
5) Very low number of tweets. A lot of the accounts I looked at contained very few tweets or tweets that had not been made during the past few weeks.
6) There is no avatar. Most legitimate Twitter users will upload a photo of themselves, the logo of their favourite brand or their own company logo.
Do you know of any other ways to spot a Twitter spammer?
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