7 Ways to Identify a Twitter Spammer

Filed in: Tips, Web — November 4th, 2009

I told you to use TwitBlock to spot and block Twitter spammers from your Twitter followers. But how do you identify a Twitter spammer? Here are a few tips to help you.

Generally, to identify a Twitter spammer, we look at the user’s avatar icon, user name, number of followers, number of following, number of tweets, tweets pattern.

A Twitter user is probably a spammer, if it matches more than 1 of the following:

  1. their profiles are using default Twitter avatar OR using a sexy pic as avatar.
  2. their names are ended with numeric, example: david567
  3. they are following many other Twitter users but only has few followers.
  4. they have no update or few updates with links.
  5. their Twitter updates contains repeated tweets with link.
  6. their Twitter updates are published using ONLY Twitter API.
  7. they show you how to “make money overnight”.

Once you found a Twitter spammer, please report it to Twitter (read my previous blog post: How to report a Twitter spammer?).

Follow me at @liewcf (I am NOT a spammer!)

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  • beaulife

    Good points to follow! Thanks Liew.

    [Delighting Lifestyle] Best Buy And Idea | Blog And Store
    Follow me on Twitter

  • http://www.kuzzuk.net/ Dipankar Kuzzuk Subba

    Great post but I disagree with the username ending with numbers makes one a spammer.

    See ya back at pb.com

  • http://thailandlandofsmiles.com/ Talen

    #8. the barely clothed hot chick that wants you to check out her profile

  • http://www.liewcf.com LiewCF

    username ending with numeric alone does not make one a spammer. can't deny that many twitter bot register username ends with numeric.

  • http://www.ucwebcreations.com/ Ursula

    I agree that these are definitely pointers in the right direction, but definitely some people who are not spammers do have numbers at the end of their Twitter name, so you want to be careful and basically look at a Twitter page overall with the above points in mind. :) Retweeting this one! :)

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