Who NOT to Follow on Twitter

Once or twice a week, I go over my list of followers on Twitter checking for recent additions. I look at the various profiles and decide who to follow back. I am at the point where I follow back only about half the people who start following me (of course, calling them “people” is taking it a bit too far – some being bots, or automated scripts). So, figured I’d share my criteria here, for accounts I will NOT follow on Twitter:

1. Porn spammers – some of them actually use pornographic images for their avatars, saving me the need to check their profiles. Those I not only no-follow, but also block from my account. Those that simply offer me a link to viewing their recently uploaded “adult pictures”, I just ignore.

2. Quote bots – If an account does nothing but tweet out quotes, I just ignore them. I am not that familiar with the various automated Twitter scripts, but I bet there is at least one that sends out daily quotes… Thanks for trying, but really, these quotes mainly inspire me not to follow you back.

3. RT bots – RT stands for “Re-Tweet”. Basically that means you pick someone else’s tweet and “re-send” it to your own list. Now, this is not a bad thing. When actual people RT my tweets I am flattered and thankful. However, when I come across an account that has nothing but RT’s in it, when those RT’s are pretty meaningless and when that Twiterrer never ever adds their own input to the RT, then I’m pretty sure it’s an automated script. For some variety, I have noticed some bots mix quotes and RT’s btw. No, thanks.

4. Empty Twitter accounts – some of my new followers have no tweets under their username. Others may only have one or two tweet from their early days and then nothing. While these may be legitimate accounts, only used by people to follow others, I will not follow back. For one thing, why should I, if there are no tweets to follow? For another, I have seen too many of these that come with wierd usernames and bios, and I suspect that some of them at least are bots, creating “fake” accounts to be used for boosting other accounts down the road.

5. Anyone with MLM in their username – I don’t need MLM spam, thanks. Anyone with “marketing” in their username is also carefully screened (although I’m ok with more sophisticated Twitter-based marketing strategies – I just want to make sure there is actually a person there doing the tweets).

6. Weird letter combos or female names with several digists following – bots, bots, bots… or spam, even if there’s a human in the registration process.

7. Nothing but tweets about what song you’re listening to – either you have a script running there or you’re really really bored.

8. Tweets that are not in English – I am fine with Hebrew, myself, but Tweetdeck isn’t. Can’t read any tweets in Hebrew there. Other languages, even if supported, I can’t really follow. So, bottom line – tweets in English only, please.

9. Accounts that follow 2000+ people but only get followed back by 50 – either there tweets are really bad, or they’re a bot getting followbacks from other bots.

And those are my tips as a seasoned user of Twitter for the past two months. If your account does not fall under these criteria, please follow me and I’ll probably follow back!

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