image by jmilles

As much as I would like to say that everyone on Twitter cares about everyone else, you probably already know that isn’t true. Not only don’t they care, many of them are not even real. For those of us who have been using Twitter for years, this is not new news but if you are new to the platform or only dabbled before, you might wonder what to do with the spammers.

The Basic Rules for Following on Twitter:

1. First of all, you don’t have to follow everyone who follows you. Some people will tell you that this is the way to build numbers but numbers are not always the best way to grow true relationships. Choose who you want to follow. Every tweet you push out can attract odd followers. Yesterday I was talking about how I shared my photos with Twitpic using both my PC and Windows Phone and this morning in my new followers is Appdealswp who represents apps for Windows Phones. Keywords will bring you followers but not necessarily the ones you planned.
2. Does the person have a photo? I know some people are camera shy but really? If you want to be on social media, you need to have a photo. The standard egg on Twitter brands you as a newbie or worse, a bot.
3. Look at the stream, if you see the same thing repeated over and over whether or not there is a photo, it probably means it is a bot or at least someone who is clueless about how Twitter works.

When to block someone?

When you see a continuous stream of the same thing, it is time to block and report them. It crowds the stream and frankly it is just annoying. Whether is is walmart gift cards or an IPad giveaway, if it sounds too good to be true, just block and report. People (or bots) can appear in your stream even if you never followed them. If they use your name, you will see them.

Be careful who you block and report because it will eventually lead to their account being suspended. Twitter checks for these types of accounts anyway and they do get blocked by Twitter too.

Using this strategy will decrease the annoying accounts that bother you much better than setting your status to protected tweets which will decrease your opportunity to enjoy Twitter.

If by chance, you were thinking about using bot-like, mass broadcasting strategies on Twitter, don’t! As you can guess, you might be the one blocked if you do.