Twitter SPAM and how to deal with it.

So you have decided to drive traffic to your websites with Twitter but now you are are getting swamped with SPAM which makes Twitter useless (at least as far as following the updates of good Twitter accounts). Well, the following article is a common sense strategy to help tame the Twitter SPAM problem.

But first we need to review how we ended up with this problem in the first place. To market on Twitter you need to create Twitter accounts for your various websites and you also need to build these Twitter accounts up by getting lots of targeted followers that will be interested in what you have to say. To do this, you need to use a tool such as Tweetadder and follow people on Twitter that you want to follow you back. The problem is, that when you follow tons of folks on Twitter you will also end up following tons of Twitter spammers which makes your Twitter account pretty much useless since it will be filled with spam-ish style updates.

Does this look familiar…?

Does your Twitter account look like processed meat product?

You could always unfollow accounts that SPAM your Twitter timeline but trust me when you are following tens of thousands of accounts it will be no easy task. You could also make Twitter lists of the accounts that you DO like and then you could ignore the SPAM. The problem with that approach is it is very time consuming (picking and choosing good accounts) and it doesn’t help the fact that all these spammers will be filling up your direct message box, therefore we do not believe that is a viable strategy.

Avoiding Twitter SPAM is as simple as this:

Create a new Twitter account, an account that you will NOT be using for marketing purposes (lets call this account your “personal” or “hot list” Twitter account). With this personal account you will only follow the folks that you REALLY want to read what they have to say. You will not be trying to build up the following of this account, you could even set the account to “private” if you really want to keep it hidden from the spammers. Then you could use a great tool such as Tweetie and review this Twitter account daily looking for interesting content to retweet or get links from to retweet from your other marketing Twitter accounts.

Therefore what you are really doing is creating a master account to follow those that interest you and sacrificing all of your marketing Twitter accounts, building them up only to send out updates.

As an example, I have 12 Twitter accounts. 10 of these accounts are used for marketing purposes and driving traffic to various web properties that I own. With these 10 accounts I build them up daily with Tweetadder so that they gain a large targeted following. Yet by doing that those 10 accounts are filled with SPAM and reading any updates from within those accounts is essentially useless (thanks to the spammers). So I send out updates and links with those 10 accounts and drive traffic. I use the other two Twitter accounts as follows: one account is my “idea basket”, I send updates to that account with ideas and status updates that I might want to use in the future. The other account is my “master” account or “personal” or “hot list” account (whatever you want to call it) where I follow people that interest me and Twitter accounts that are useful for retweeting purposes etc. I do NOT follow any accounts that are not of special interest to me and therefore I avoid all Twitter SPAM with and it’s always the first account I read each morning which allows me to use Twitter in the way it was intended.

I realize this strategy seems like common sense but you would be surprised how many folks have asked us to help them with their Twitter SPAM problem and when we tell them about the way we handle our Twitter accounts they almost always say “why didn’t I think of that?”, so we decided to share it here and hope that some of you find this approach to Twitter SPAM helpful.

Tagged as: SPAM, twitter, twitter SPAM