Image by Neal. via Flickr

With twitter being all the rage it is easy to be caught up in the idea of getting a huge following on the site especially if you are looking to improve your visibility online for your business. With many on the internet sharing ways to “increase followers” and make money with twitter it is important to step back a bit and really look at how you want yourself to be portrayed online. Think of it this way: with traditional advertising would you dump a thousand leaflets on the front yard of someones house hoping that they would provide some business? No you wouldn’t.

Don’t Be a Spammer

Twitter is full of spammers now that it has hit the big time and these accounts are usually pretty easy to spot, they follow heaps of people hoping to be followed back and then unfollow those who do not follow them. Real people do this too in the hunt to get a certain number of followers. Ask yourself this question: Do I want quality followers who are interested in what I tweet or just numbers? The answer is simple.

Case Study: My Own Twitter Account

Being a relatively early adopter of twitter in Australia I can say that it was a fantastic site and still is. The problem now is everyone has their opinions of how to increase followers. The fact is the only way you will increase followers if you are not  celebrity is to have good tweets and good content (with more tweets than links people). My own twitter account for kjwriteleft.com has over 3000 followers which sounds good until you are as skeptical as I am.

I recently spent about an hour trying to rid myself of spam followers after I too was caught up in the “follow back” rubbish that goes on around twitter. If you do follow back indiscriminately chances are you are just following spammers or really crappy accounts. The same goes for your followers who only want you as a number. UNFOLLOW THEM! I have recently blocked around 300 accounts form following me (yes I stop people following me) as well as a similar number I was following.

Be Harsh!

I would prefer 100-200 people who enjoy my tweets and site links rather than 3000 people who really don’t care. You really have to be very hard on others twitter accounts and the best tip for this is to look at your twitter feed and see what people are tweeting. If it is rubbish immediately UNFOLLOW. If it is irrelevant to you UNFOLLOW. You have to be cruel to be kind and the more everyone just “follows back” anyone following them the worse twitter will become.

So how do these people get away with all this spamming? After a little research you can find A LOT of programs that automate tweets and target people tweeting about certain things to follow. Seriously, do a search for “automate twitter” and you will find a lot of people are doing this. The programs will automatically follow people mentioning certain topics and automatically unfollow people who don’t follow back after a certain amount of time. This is a great reason NOT to follow back.

Some Helpful Tools:

Not sure what followers are spam? Then definitely check out these sites:

Twitblock – scans all of your followers and rates them according to spamminess. You can also scan your own account to see if you fall under the spam category.

Twitter Report Spam – the simplest way to get rid of spam accounts is to unfollow and block as well as report them to twitter. There is a button on twitter to do this.

If you have any further questions feel free to post a comment andI hope to follow up on this topic at a later date to let you all know how my twitter clean out program is going.

KJ Halliday also writes for kjwriteleft.com

Related articles

• Spammers Must Be Destroyed! (kjwriteleft.com)
• Don’t Say You Follow Back (marketingconversation.com)
• How To Not Get Banned On Twitter (bloggingot.com)
• 12 Reasons Why People Unfollow You on Twitter – Coz You’re Sick ? (madrasgeek.com)