Purge your Twitter account of spam followers

A quick look at most Twitter accounts reveals that spam has well and truly infiltrated the world of Twitter. Whilst all spammers are annoying, what makes me angry is the number of explicit Twitter spammers with pornographic profile images.

I’ve recently tested two free services that analyze your account, and help you identify and then remove spam followers.

Twitblock

Twitblock works in the following way:

“A points system is used to order your followers with the most likely spam at the top of the list. There is no limit to the actual score, it is just used to order the list from high to low. A score doesn’t guarantee an account is spam; it’s just a relative indicator, and a non-zero score doesn’t mean the account is black-listed in any way. The score is worked out using various factors associated with spam and nuisance accounts. If you analyse a single account you will see a verbal description of the indicators that have been applied.”

You can use Twitblock in two ways:

1. Check if a Twitter account is likely to be spam.

On the homepage is a link to ‘Bot or Not’, with a field to enter the details of a Twitter account. Twitblock will then give you some stats on the account to help you determine if the account is spam, or not.

2. Analyse your Twitter account for spam followers.

By entering your Twitter account details in the ‘Fan or Spam’ section you can have your Twitter followers analyzed for signs of spamminess.

Followers with a high points score are more likely to be spam (see description above), and if they look like spam you can block and then report them.

Twerp Scan
Twerp Scan provides more analytical tools than Twitblock, with lots of options for viewing data about your own profile, plus the profiles of your followers and those you follow.

What I particularly like about Twerp Scan is the ability to do bulk edits, e.g. block a follower, stop following, start following. The one frustrating bug is that all of my followers and the people I’m following are duplicated (six times!) in the listing:

It would also be useful to not only be able to block followers, but to block and report as spam.

Conclusion
Both of these tools are free services that are serving a very useful cause – helping Twitter users clean up their spam. Try them out and analyze your account – just be prepared to have a few less followers after you’re done!