How many spammers are following you according to TwitBlock?
September 15th, 2009 by Andreas from Xavier Media®On the 12th of September I noticed that John Chow unfollowed our Twitter account @XavierMedia, so I check out his Twitter account to see what was going on.I turns out that he unfollowed almost all his 55,000+ followers except for about 100 close friends, because he was tired of all DM spam.
In his blog he says:
Let’s be honest here. It’s impossible to follow 55,000 people.
And to be absolutely honest he's 100% correct. You can't follow 55 000 people and read everything they have to say each and every day. The number of hours each day is not enough!!!
The short-term consecvence by unfollowing all your followers on Twitter is unfortunately a hughe dropp in your own followers count. But is that all that counts? I would say no, since it would be nice to read what your friends have to say and not just get tons of spam every time you check your Twitter account….
So what's the solution if you don't what to unfollow ALL your followers?
I found a service called TwitBlock which is a simple Twtiter service that will tell you if a user may be a spammer or not. I say "may" since it's not 100% sure that a user is a spammer just because it get a high ignore factor at TwitBlock.
You can of course both check one single user or scan your entire followers list to find people/users to have a closer look at. When you look up a user at TwitBlock you get information like Ignore Factor, follower rate (how many they follow versus how many that follow them) and how many times they've been blocked. You also get information on how many other accounts got the same profile picture. Spammers are not so smart so thy use different profile pictures for all their account, sometimes (or more exactly many times) they re-use their pictures and that's giving you a good indicator if you're dealing witha spammer or not.
Since I love statistics, I really like their page with the most used profile pictures 
which indicates with accounts/profile pictures you should stay away from (unless you only want spam in your Twitter account).
To help you check followers you find on the Internet they have a nice little utility which you simply just drag to your browser toolbar. Every time you find someone new to follow you just click on that button in your browser and you can fill in the Twitter user name of the user. TwitBlock will then show you the ignore factor so you can decide if someone is worth following. Read more about the utility at http://www.twitblock.org/utils.php
How many spammers are following you according to TwitBlock?
You may also be interested in...Google – a growing spam problem
Block spam comments in your blog
I hope you didn't enjoy your spam free inbox too much…
September 17th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Thanks for the info. in regards to our Twitter accounts, it is true that some people are just letting anyone sign up so they can show that they have tons of followers. But with this twitblock it s ounds like it will benefit all of us who use Twitter. Thanks a lot for info.
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