by Sherice Jacob (follow her @sherice), a web designer, copywriter and author of Get Niche Quick!
One of the more openly advertised ways of getting a high number of followers to your Twitter account is to follow high-profile bloggers, tweeters and newsmakers. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? According to a new post by TwitTown – automated re-following could be putting your account in danger.
If you’re like most Tweeters, you shouldn’t be worried. However, Twitter is taking a closer look at automatic re-following, originally promoted to help new Tweeters get attention and build an audience, as a case for spam and closing your account. What particularly annoys Twitter is when re-following doesn’t happen just once, but constantly over the course of a certain period of time.
The TwitTown article highlights Twitter user Louis Gray who has profiled two of the rogue Twitter spammers, @PoliticalUpdate and @twtr.us (both of whose accounts have since been suspended). Like many users, Louis has set his Twitter account to update when he has new followers. Getting several emails a day from these Twits got his attention and he started chronicling their follows, un-follows and re-follows. Of course, like many spammers, they’re hoping that the more you see their name in your inbox, the more your curiosity will be piqued and you’ll check them out.
So How Do You Stop Them in Their Tracks?
Until Twitter adds a simple spam-prevention layer like a CAPTCHA (those random letters and numbers you enter when you register on some websites) or keeps portions of their API closed to prying eyes, people will always be trying to game the system. In the meantime, you can clear out notifications like these by doing just what Louis did.
First, if you don’t have notifications enabled in Twitter, enable them in your Twitter settings so you can find out when people follow you. If you get several follows from the same user, you likely have a spammer on your hands. You might even want to create a message filter just with that subject line – such as
“@_____ is now following you on Twitter!” – so any emails with that subject will be diverted to a specific folder.
Watch, Wait and Report
Now you wait a couple of days. Collect the evidence of these robotic re-follows and bring it to Twitter’s attention. You can take a screenshot as easily as pressing the Print Screen (PrtScn) key on your keyboard (usually above the Home / End / Delete keys) and opening up Microsoft Paint and choosing Edit > Paste to add the screenshot. Then save it as a JPEG and you’ve got some proof to hand over to the Twitter authorities. You can submit the information in a support ticket by contacting Twitter here.
By following these steps, you’ll be able to keep your Twitter account clear of unsightly spammers and hopefully motivate Twitter to add in the protective steps it so desperately needs.
@DVDweets
Thanks for this. I’ve noticed people getting mad because they are losing follwers. Their followers realize they auto-anything and unfollow them. Auto-following sort of defeats the purpose of Twitter, I think. I’m not a big fan.
@NateDesmond
That is interesting. Is it bad to automatically follow everyone who follows you?
Thanks,
Nate
@Sheamus
I’ve had a few of these even with my modest follow count. Curiously, I also had multiple follows over 24 hours by a chap who was in no way, shape or form a spammer. He knew it was happening but had no idea why. He got in touch with Twitter and it didn’t happen again.
Obviously Louis Gray’s example above is quite different.
Fair enough, I think: it’s a known way to not only get the attention of the person you’re following but more importantly if you get a follow-back (which many users do either automatically using an external service or manually themselves out of courtesy) you’ll immediately go to the top of that person’s list of followers. This usually means a few extra follows for you as well, as many people browse the follow lists of power-users on Twitter and follow the people they’re following. Obviously if you’re at the top of the list you’ve got a better chance of being followed. And if you *keep* being on top of the list (by un- and then re-following) you can get a lot of extra business (so to speak).
@UnknownFilms
If you’re on a Mac you can also take a screen shot by pressing [Command+Shift+3].
I’m glad Twitter is looking into this, the spammers are kinda getting old.
@LoneWolfMuskoka
It is always interesting to see what tactics the spammers are using. I haven’t noticed a lot of this type of activity since I don’t have a large following, but I still see several follows a day from a bot that uses 1 name for the account and a different name for the id, usually followed by 3 numbers. I’m not talking about a nickname (like mine) but rather something like “Kelly (Sherry325) is now … ” I don’t have a clue why they don’t stick with Kelly (Kelly325).
I wish that Twitter made it easier to block — I don’t like the confirmation step.
@kayce_m
i always thought i was just supposed to block them (so @twitter gets a high number of blocks and removes the account)… now, when i get 4 or 5 follow messages from the same person i’ll report it instead.
@sherice
You shouldn’t have anything to worry about if you simply automatically follow people who follow you – but doing it constantly (and on purpose) is sure to catch Twitter’s eye.
@renkai
Interesting… I have not encountered this type problem myself yet
@esd714
This is a good thing for all on Twitter. Not sure I have every truly understood the auto-follows, and I hate the ones that come wiht a commerce link.
@gb200802
I use an “auto-follow” to follow those that follow me, but I’ve not seen this refollow game before. Seems like it should be pretty easy to block tho’. I guess with this kind of growth, spam is just inevitable – shame tho’.
@WendyMerritt
If they would just use their powers for good…instead of evil! LOL
There always has to be bad people to ruin everything for the good people! Who sits around and thinks of this stuff? I have not come across this myself…yet. Thanks for the heads up!
Blessings,
Wendy
@timmyjohnboy
For quick and easy screen capture, I use Lightscreen Portable (found in the portableapps.com download package)
@eristoddle
I don’t usually get this much, but I do notice familiar usernames that seem to refollow me every day or so. Most get their accounts deleted by the time I notice the pattern. I think some of these users may be just trying to get your attention and some may be looking for people who have auto-follow set up. By following a lot of people, they gain a lot of followers automatically.
@louisgray
I don’t think real people who use Twitter in a normal way are in danger of this happening to them. The great news is that Twitter was listening, and appears to have disabled the accounts I mentioned.
@ScottSharpe
This is something I’ve been thinking about lately. I think they should create a limit to how many people you can follow per day without having to enter a captcha. I hate captchas, and they tend to put me in a bad mood when I repeatedly enter them in wrong.
I find new people to follow everyday. It would be cool if you could follow 25-50 people per day without a captcha. Anything over 25-50 would require one.
This would cut down on spam and keep twitter relatively “easy”. But if I had to enter a captcha every time I wanted to follow someone I probably wouldn’t follow many people.
- Scott
@marioremedios
Great article. Twitter could be such a powerful tool for marketing and getting to know interesting people in general. However, since it is a relatively new social media site, I think it still needs some major improvements to avoid spammers from gaming the system. I have come across those who follow and re-follow and also those who follow many and then unfollow, then follow some more and continue the cycle to simply gain more followers. Not cool!
@exuvia
This is so interesting. I don’t know much about Twitter just yet (I’m learning!), but I never knew there was so much to such a simple tool. Of course, even at Twitter we’ll see spammers. I just can’t believe people get this desperate.
@hectorhenry17
Mmm i did know about this. to have in mind.
@Tweetplate
It’ll be interesting to see how Twitter “traffics” this problem in the future and how effective it will be.
@sherice
I think Twitter has gotten so big, so fast, that it’s only naturally they’d attract spammers and people trying to game the system. Spammers are so desperate to be seen any way they can that this is what it’s come to. If they’d just concentrate on quality and non quantity, Twitter would be a much better place for everyone
@MadlabPost
I am starting to realize how much I am out of tune with a lot of the popular websites. I am not familiar with re-following and that people were doing that, so I am really not that hip!
This is a helpful post. Thanks for writing it.
First spammers were annoying people on forums and then on myspace and then on digg and then on blogs and now twitter? It is a shame that normal folk are not able to have any fun and peace without being annoyed be these losers.
@ganeshsrinivas
Then, I won’t let those spammers ruin the peace on twitter. I’ll definitely notify twitter if I ever find someone who is spamming.
@IMSales
As my name would suggest I am interested in Internet Marketing Sales, and that is why I have IMSales for a twitter id. My posts and bio make it clear what I use this profile for. I use a program called Hummingbird to help me follow people, and manage my followings. I could be spammy with it, yet I am not. One of the nice things is that it has a “Protect Previously Unfollowed” so I don’t get caught up in the follow/un-follow/re-follow game. Also, I don’t run the program every day, so you won’t see a follow request one day and then it is gone the next.
Everyone using Hummingbird makes sure to follow people that have shown an interest in a niche subject matter in one form or another. For example who would follow Craig Beckta except family and those that have purchase an affiliate marketing training course from him? Another example is Willie Crawford – he is one of the best known internet marketers on Twitter, and so whoever follows him is interested in internet marketing, so they have already expressed an interest in what I am interested in as well. If you do a search for friends with a keyword of real estate you will find your target audience. Yes, I could try following, and befriending everyone who follows CNNbrn (CNN breaking news), yet it would just waste my time and energy, and make me just as bad as the spammer at the start of this blog entry.
I am using the program even now, to follow everyone that has chosen to follow me first – it is almost like the auto-follow feature of some other sites, but better – again I am not getting into the follow/un-follow/re-follow loop. I provide a whole lot more content and info than I do links to products I am promoting – heck, I have more informative posts than links – unless you count music from Blip.fm
I also have a personal account, and it is just that. I don’t spam links with any of my accounts, and this one is limited to just that, items of personal interest, not business related. I still use Hummingbird on my personal account, yet the subject matter is very different, and I am more constrained in my use of it.
Tools – not just that you have them, yet what you use them for, makes a difference. How do you use a stake knife? Do you use it for cutting your stake into smaller bites, or for killing a person? The tool itself is not the problem, it is the person using it. Do you use a car to get you from point A to point B, or do you use it to mow people down (drunk or not)?
I would be more concerned with people that don’t hold the same ethics that we do. Gaming the system is going to happen no matter what, even if you have a reCaptcha code installed, someone is going to find a way around it. It is how we deal with it that makes a difference.
@mjray
“a simple spam-prevention layer like a CAPTCHA” is not so simple for people like me who have mild eyesight problems. Please don’t advocate them as a way to stop spam. CAPTCHAs stop people, not spam. Twitter is doing the right thing, detecting spammers and suspending them for investigation, but it might be doing it in a bit of a harsh way.
@johnsamuel
I don’t like ‘CAPTCHA’ like solution. I would rather want Twitter to monitor such events of re-following. The simplistic design of Twitter is its success factor. Adding more complications just to deal around with a solution is not a good idea. As you said, the users can complain about such activities to Twitter
There will always be people out there trying to mess things up for everyone! Thanks for this valuable information. Now that I know how to detect these spammers, I’ll be keeping an eye open and reporting them as I come across them. Hopefully with everyone on the watch for them we can help Twitter weed these spammers out of our backyards!
@sherice
I completely understand what you’re saying MJRay (I have vision problems as well – so some of the captchas can be hard to read). Fortunately I would hope that Twitter would keep accessibility in mind and offer the option to also hear the words. Of course the best case scenario would be ScottSharpe suggested – only starting the CAPTCHA after XX number of followers. That way, honest people aren’t penalized but spammers have to go through an extra layer of “nuisance”.
You really have nothing to worry about if you’re just following people like the average Twitter user would. It’s the automated follow-unfollow-refollow spammy robots that constantly prop up their user ID/website to the top of your email list that present a problem. It would be great if Twitter would stay on top of the problem but they’ve grown, what, 1200% so far this year – that’s a lot of manpower to stop a lot of bots!
@IMSales
Hello again folks,
Who would say Startbucks (yes, the coffee people) are spammy? I would not be surprised to see if they use an automated follow for those who follow them – they are just too large to follow everyone that follow them. And what about the Dell outlet? So, if these two companies get followed in the 100’s per day then they would not be able to follow you back because of the suggested idea of not being able to follow more than 25 or 50 people per day?
A better idea would be to improve the API and make it mandatory to get whitelisted for a program, or the API rejects the request. Right now the API is well published, changing some, yet anyone can develop for it. Some developers submit their programs to Twitter to get whilelisted, meaning approved and tested. If Twitter had a special piece of code (like an MD5 hash) that was generated based on code submitted for testing, and that would have to be embedded into the program for authentication, it would help some. There is so much more to this, yet I think it would be possible to track the program, and the user, and then if the metrics (how they measure bandwidth, etc) gets out of wack you just ban one person using the program, not the whole community.
I think there is a way for both individuals and business to co-exist, and do so happily. We just need to find the common ground, and set some stern guidelines. Just because I represent a business doesn’t mean I am not a person, nor am I trying to spam anyone. As stated, in reply #23 above, I do use Twitter for personal reasons as well.
@IMSales
Sorry folks, I just noticed something in all of these comments, everyone has a link in there name, and only one person did not supply their tweeter name. This just makes me want to laugh – here we are talking about spamming, and yet we are all trying to get links back to our sites, without anyone noticing. RoFlMarseO
@LoneWolfMuskoka
@Internet Marketing Sales I guess that you don’t understand the concept of spam. These links and Twitter ids are entered by real people and are asked for by the host of the site. They are a way for real people to interact with one another.
We all notice each other’s links and sometimes we check out the site or follow the person on Twitter because of what we see in their comments.
Spam is unsolicited, often inappropriate and usually automated.
@sethgoldstein
Great article. It will be interesting to see how Twitter addresses spammers in the future if they take a pre or a post approach to dealing with it. Captha being the the pre approach and suspending accounts being the post.
@IMSales
Hi LoneWolf,
I think I may not of conveyed the humor I see so you, or others, can understand it. Yes, we are encouraged to provide our names and Twitter id so we are not like post #32 – Anonymous (most likely waiting for approval). What I find funny is that we are talking about spam (and not the lunch meat developed during WWII) and that almost everyone here knows how to turn their name into a link, and that could be considered spamming the search engines.
I don’t think I could of said it any better, and I do agree with it. ReTweets could even be considered spam if someone just RTs a tweet without looking at it, just forwarding it on to their followers.
I hope you understand better the humor I see in this tread. It isn’t the spamming of people on twitter that I find funny, it is how we all know to get our names to show up as links. I don’t think spamming should be allow, even in emails. Lets charge spammers (twitter, email, etc) $5 per person a spammy message is delivered to, and share it with the receptionist and the networks it travels over.
Thanks for sharing this post. I am really overwhelmed with the comments posted in here. Good thing that Twitter has taken actions to this game. All will ok in time i think..
@LoneWolfMuskoka
Hi Internet Marketing Sales. Actually, I do see where you are going with your comments on spam, but my contention is that what you are seeing here in this thread (with the exception of Anonymous as you described) is not spam. The links back to your web site and twitter id are part of our identity and we are encouraged to leave them when we share our thoughts on one another’s blogs. It is a trade of value for value — comments for links and exposure.
That isn’t to say that there is never spam in blog comments. I see more automated spam in my blogs than live comments — thanks Askimet for keeping most of it out. I’ve also seen a comment that was borderline but the person made an effort to comment on my post before adding a link to his own site.
I guess that what I’m trying to say is that while the spammers and bloggers who comment on other sites are trying to achieve the same result, that doesn’t make comments like yours and mine spam.
I also agree with you on the RT without looking. I actually saw someone tweet last week that they were glad that they could always RT certain people without having to check out the links!
One problem that I have is that due to slow internet connection I will usually click on the link and keep reading tweets while the pages load. Then, by the time I get around to reading the page the tweet has scrolled out of view and I usually forget who tweeted in in the first place. I find self-contained tweets easier to RT since I can see the value of the tweet immediately. I think I’m starting to ramble a little off topic here 8=) Time to get some shut eye.
@karenaguilar
Yes spammers are everywhere – why should this be different? As soon as I get a spam, I notify @spam and the problem is solved. You may want to follow them.
@LockwoodChris
Here is my sugggestion: turn off those notifications entirely and don’t worry about stuff like this. I don’t need an email every time someone follows me or unfollows me- that just clogs my inbox and wastes my time deleting notices.
People can follow or unfollow as they wish- I see no reason to act like tattletales or vigilantes on Twitter.
@djodcouk
Really interesting – I don’t do automated following but was considering it, now I’ll think twice…
@the_gman
It is annoying when someone constantly keeps following you and you get notification after notification that they are following you.
@8chocolate
@Chris Lockwood I like to know who’s following me. I check out their site and if their content or views are interesting or relevant to me in my life or work, I follow them. Many I would never have found had they not followed me in the first place so I do like the notifications.
I think the biggest problem is people want to have lots of followers to feel popular so they feel they need to follow anyone that follows them. I’d like to think I’ve left high school (hopefully) behind.
@elizobihfrank
As a relative newbie to Twitter, I find the practice of follow/unfollow rather bizarre. Initially, I thought the behavior was juvenile because I had assumed a few people f/unf me based on my tweets or comments on hot topics; unfortunately, the practise as shared above is quite insidious!
I tweet a lot, enjoy interacting and exchanging information with others, and I’m loyal to followers. I was baffled in the beginning with the fair sized daily shifts in followers and couldn’t figure it out until others started complaining about it in their tweets. Spamming for numbers? It makes no sense to sully the social aspect of Twitter by turning it into a mind/head/numbers game….
Recently, I decided to manage my home page better and things have improved with Tweetlater. Yes, I now autofollow/unfollow and do a manual check to see if any of the usual suspects are re-following me. Will this change the practise? Probably not; especially if we factor in Twitter glitches or the actions of Tweeters who are easily bored/annoyed.
Now that I have read this piece I will be vigilant and simply follow the suggestions above to block/report such abusers.
I guess what some of these folk are forgetting is that building rapport is equally important to making the sale; especially if you want lifelong customers.
Cheers!