Very often (social media being a good example), a lot of effort is put into mastering the tools rather than timeless principles.

Principles can be applied to any tool.

Tools change and can be replaced easily.

I had to make one for this post (“There are 15,740 Social Media Experts on Twitter”).

Probably a lot. I don’t follow spam accounts, but they do follow me thinking I might press the “follow” button and I guess it’s no different for you if you are a little active on twitter. I noticed a huge drop in followers this week and I checked a couple of twitter accounts using twittercounter.com to find out most accounts experienced the same drop: it was twitter cleaning the house. Thank god.

I asked myself: “What percentage of my followers are purely spam accounts”? If you consider that I lost 147 followers that day and that I show an average growth of about 30 followers a day, twitter probably killed around 180 accounts that were following me that day. It actually is 4% of my followers. Add on top of that the spammy accounts that weren’t removed because they were too new or things like that, we probably end up with a 5-7% (if not 10%) of followers being spammy.

There’s more spam

You know, we end up with 5-7% being purely spam accounts that were STILL following me, but there’s more to include in the equation. I probably get a dozen new followers each day that eventually end up unfollowing me because I’m not following back. I haven’t really looked at the numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 20% of the new follower notifications I receive were spam. That’s how ridiculous it is.

I’ve been complaining about the spam on twitter since day one and things are only getting worst. But you know, it’s good to see twitter taking actions like that and killing accounts: they are actually doing something about it.

So, what percentage of your followers do you think are spam accounts?