Technology, business and change
What percentage of your twitter followers are spam accounts?
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?
RSS
twitter
No idea, but a lot. There is also all the "marketing guru" and the people selling crappy stuff. Oh well, at least, it's easy to ignore them.
Oh yeah, twitter is the kingdom of marketing, social media and business coach gurus/extraordinaire/expert, etc…
Annoying, but easy to ignore as you point out.
Well, considering that I get 3-10 new follow notifications despite the fact that I'm tweeting less than 3 times a week…. I'm going to say a good portion. Probably almost half, actually.
Yes, if you aren't tweeting a lot and still receiving follow notifications, probably a good portion is spam. Annoying it is!
THanks Lori!
Ed Dale posts some good stuff on this follow me follow you craze. How people think their popularity somehow increases by how many people they follow of follow them, I don't know. If you follow more than a few dozen people how are you ever supposed to see what they tweet amongst all the babble… I recently un-followed all but 20 people, and noticed a drop off in my followers, but I'm finally seeing the benefit of Twitter by getting great Tweets from people I WANT to hear from.
Hey Chris!
You are right that it is hard to follow a lot of people. I'm in the group of people who follow A LOT of people (like over 4K). Of course I can't read them all, but it's an interesting flow of information and I split my followers into "groups" using tweetDeck. This makes it a lot easier.
Thanks for dropping a comment.
I had never seen TwitterCounter before. Thanks for posting that.
And yes, junk followers suck.
Warmest,
Jonathan
http://www.ThreeMoneyMethods.com
You are right, I have seen many twitter accounts which create on the basis of marketing purpose or spamming. People add followers without seen if they are real and honest or they just follow to spam on twitter. Really informative post. Thanks Benoit Tremblay
I'd say a lot considering I have only just started twittering and have a number of followers even though I have not posted much.
I've seen this trend happening alot on twitter where they add you, and like you said, they expect you will follow them back, or you will check them out which is why they do it in the first place. That's the thing about twitter though. To me sometimes it seems like an uphill battle, when alot of people are out there trying to market to each other, and that there is not many genuine Twitter users. What I wonder is, what % of twitter users are out there for the purpose of marketing vs the purpose of using it for real non-marketing.
Till then,
Jean
What a good question (% of twitter users for the purpose of marketing Vs non-marketing) and could easily be a blog post. I feel like most people on twitter are trying to get something back, which is understandable and not a bad thing. I won't hide the fact that I get traffic to my blog using twitter and that this is some sort of marketing, but I'm connecting with awesome people everyday because of that…
So, I think that even if the first purpose is marketing, you get caught in the "care about people" game!
I think more than 80% of pplz are spammers its worth less to increasing your followers
i thing 50%-80% SPAM
lot of twitter account is SPAM. I have seen twitter have 6.000 followers and i thing it's impossible.
Last day i have seen 100> same posting, advertise an junk porn website and now i making a new private twitter account, and now i just wanna following and accept follower people that i know.
50-80% is a crapload of spam…
All of them
I don't use my twitter account, I signed up for it once and never came back yet I still have like 10 followers. If they're not spammers someone must really like my username 
haha yeah, they probably are spammers. But…use twitter, it's an awesome tool and a lot of fun!
I think at least half if not more of new followers are spam accounts. I had over a hundred followers yesterday, when I logged on today I had 80 something so Twitter must have done something.
I think about protecting my updates but then I would miss out on new followers who find me legitimately, so for now I'm not going that route.
A couple of days ago, I had 415 followers. Today I look at it again to find only 398. Plus I had recently went through a list of people who weren't interesting anymore, along with followers who recently unfollowed me (since I was inactive for a couple of weeks..), and even blocked a few spammers that had every tweet including the same bit.ly URL as the last one. Even after the clean up, I still had a good 410+ followers..
Just like Kat, I've also thought about protecting my updates, but then I wouldn't get the best out of Twitter. I'm sure Twitter is working on something that will prevent spammers from wasting your time.
I think 40% SPAM
A great blog with quality content – will be back for more.
http://www.suncoastinternet.com.au/
Hi,
its nice to read a useful article for beginner like me.
Some of points from this article are very helpful for me as I haven't
considered them yet.
I would like to say thank you for sharing this cool article.
Bookmarked and sharing for friends.
- Suresh
Fully agree with your article Twitter now getting more and more spammers, Twitter becomes use of spammers but very amazed still twitter's experts facing failure to remove spammers…..
Spam has gotten way out of control on twitter, so much so that i kinda backed away from it a little. The guys behind twitter need to beef up their system and take out the spammers because right now it is way to full of bots and so called "marketers".
Twitter is at the same point blogs were at for awhile with the spam. They will need to find out a way to get the spam under control or it will drag the whole site down into oblivion.
There was a recent post about an entire botnet being controlled through twitter, this goes to show that Twitter is no longer the haunt of small time spammers and the situation is getting worse.
Twitter is really great when it comes to marketing and interacting with friends. But somehow mostly people use twitter for spamming, yOu are right. nice info
Spam is something that is not going to go away. There are soo much competition on the net and spam is part of it
I use twitter very often and i follow to whom i know. There are many spam accounts in twitter.
I would say in my experience with twitter that atleast 60% of all followers are pure spam. I really seems to me that it has become mostly marketers using it to presell just about everything they can.
Certainly, every account will have such kind of spam accounts and you can not run from them. Yes if you keep an eye on every week than these can be minimal.
I do not want that any loyal follower of mine should see some porn followers.
Thanks for sharing this article. How does it affect the traffic if we are followed by spam accounts? How do we filter spams?
I've been told that the software doesn't work that way. It takes more than marking it a single time to permanently ban it to the SPAM folder. If it does end up there, simply mark it as "Not Spam."
My Yahoo contacts folder was hijacked, and a spammer sent an email several times over several days to everyone in the account.
Day by day ratio getting high of spamming in twitter and most of them spammer or been idle after creating account they not updating anything in account if remains same than Sure Twitter Become only use of spammers
its soo nice to read a useful article for beginner like me.
Some of points from this article are very helpful for me as I haven't
considered them yet.
I would like to say thank you for sharing this cool article.
Bookmarked and sharing for friends.
There are tons of spam account on twitter, you just have to ignore them or delete them so you don't see their spam.
most of twitter account are spam , cause they are mostly internet salesmen
… every time i click their link … i always found affliate link 
I am sure most of my followers are spam accounts, I heard somewhere that 70% of twitter users are spammers.
I think now Twitter use only for promotion and many spam accounts are there.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by A Geek, A Geek. A Geek said: @Lynn_Kathleen Look out in comments of http://bit.ly/aiMV8u [...]