8 Tips for Spotting a Spam Twitter Follower

By now, we all know not to click on links in DM. We also know that there is a new army of Britney bots that is upgraded and now showing up in our mentions.

We are all realizing more and more how important who we follow is. But, the question is, does it really matter who follows us? I mean, if we don’t follow back spam, then they will most likely unfollow us in a few days anyway, right?

There are all kinds of technical ways to indicate if a follower is spam. If you do a search on Google, you will even find that some people have developed apps that can identify it in the most sophisticated ways with cross referencing and pie graphs. My style is to keep things simple. Instead of getting all fancy about it, I’ve put together a short list of simple ways you can tell if a follower is spam. I’m sure I’ve left some things off this list, so please leave them in a comment below. Enjoy!

8 Tips for Spotting a Spam Twitter Follower

1. The follower is most likely spam if the avatar is all boobs. Thank you, @ShellyKramer, for teaching us all this. The picture below is an actual avatar of someone that recently followed me. The next day, the same avatar showed up in a new follower that had a different username. C’mon, gimme a break.

2. The follower is most likely spam if after you follow them back, they send you a direct message that says, “I looked at your website and it looks interesting!” but you don’t have a website.

3. The follower is most likely spam if you look at their page and they have no @ replies. Yep, for all you non-spammers that don’t engage people, it’s time to start tweeting folks or else someone might mistake you for spam.

4. The follower is most likely spam if they offer you a way to get really white teeth.

5. The follower is most likely spam if the username contains any or all of the words: guru, expert, money

6. The follower is most likely spam if their Twitter stream contains only quotes or shameless self-promotion.

7. The follower is most likely spam if their bio says they have “hot pics”. A boobs avatar and a hot pics bio is double confirmation that it is probably spam.

8. The follower is most likely spam if… um… the avatar is a woman in a very compromising position with the word Britney in the username. As my friend @Flipbooks said, if we have to see that Britney bot over and over, they should at least make her good looking.