Tag Archives: twitter spam

How to help reduce Twitter spam

There’s been plenty of Twitter spam around lately so to help reduce the chance of your account being hacked and used by spammers here are a couple of tips. They’ll make your account more secure and help reduce the overall amount of Twitter spam.

1. Change your Twitter password to a strong one ie it should contain a capital letter and a number. A strong password reduces the chances of a spammer being able to crack your password and access you account.
2. Review the applications you’ve authorised and revoke those you no longer need. Twitter applications can be useful - they may be tools or allow you to have easy access to a website. However, they can be hacked or malicious and provide access to your Twitter account.

To change your password and review your applications on Twitter:

• Login to www.twitter.com.
• Select Edit Settings on your Profile Page or the Head and Shoulders icon on the right of the top menu.

• Select Settings.
• From the left hand menu select Password.
• Enter Current password on the right, followed by New password and Verify password.
• Select Save changes and you’re done.

While you are in Settings you can review your apps:

• Select Apps from left hand menu.
• Your authorised apps are listed on the right.
• For those you no longer require select Revoke access and the apps will no longer be connected with your account.

It’s good practice to change your social network passwords on a regular basis to reduce the risk of your social media accounts being used by others and your personal information being stolen. Whatever you do don’t use the same password for all your social network profiles.

Do you want to learn more about Twitter for your business? Then check out my monthly Twitter Masterclasses in Cheltenham.

How many of your followers are fake?

A free new tool from @statuspeople shows how many of your followers are fake or to put it another way how many are spammers. Spam accounts could have followed you in the hope that they’ll be able to spam you with direct messages should you follow them back. Followers could also have been bought; a counter productive activity but one that’s increasing.

After connecting to your Twitter account, Fake Follower Check will analyse your followers and display number of fake followers, number of inactive followers and number of good followers.

The tool has a certain curiosity value but has two important business benefits:

1) It’s important for you to know that your followers are legitimate and active so you can engage them in conversation and provide them with valuable content. You also want them to be active so they can retweet your content.

2) It’s useful for checking the authenticity of a Twitter account and by extension the person behind so can be used as a ‘red flag indicator’. A high percentage of fake followers could indicate that followers have been purchased. Try running the tool against a few politicians, celebrities and social media consultants. If the results are interesting let me know the results in the comments below.

Checking the tool’s results against other analytical tools confirms that results are reasonably accurate although there were one or two anomalies. However, a sample of up to 1000 followers is used so results for those with above 1000 followers won’t be as accurate as those with less than a 1000.

@statuspeople are now working on integrating Fake Follower Check into their main tool and creating a fake follower removal tool.