Saturday, April 19, 2008

How to Prevent Twitter Spam

I just gave a talk about Social Media at CreateSouth today, and some concerns came up about spammers on Twitter.

I haven't seen an issue with this yet, but as we shift from primarily early adopters to more and more mainstreaming, I expect it will happen. Especially since Google is ranking tweets and twitterers quite well- the black hat SEO people will soon notice and try to exploit.

The concern was that the @replies could break in and bug your twitterstream- but fortunately, there are settings for @replies that can help. And the good news is you won't get @replies from people you don't follow at all anyway. As soon as you see spamminess, unfollow the person.

More @reply options:

Go to Settings > Notices.
  • The default setting is pretty spam-preventive; you'll only see @replies if you follow a person and the person they're @replying to.
  • If you want to network more and get in on the conversations of people you follow, choose all @replies- I'm trying this out now because I'm growing my network of contacts.
  • If you want no @replies, you can do it, but you probably shouldn't be on twitter then. IMHO.

1 comments:

Amir said...

another related issue is that spammers also uses search result reputation to evade anti-spam engines.

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