“Noise” is one of the biggest frustrations in social media. As you spend more and more time on social, there are subtle cues to notice with another user’s profile that can tip you off to the fact that user is not a legitimate account, but in fact, spam.
5 Signs you are Following a Twitter Bot
Egg Profile Picture The egg avatar is about as ‘default’ as you can get. Particularly if an egg with only a URL shows up in your @Mentions.
Missing Bio Another tip that the Twitter account might be spam. If you are on Twitter to engage and connect, it’s likely you’d spend time filling out your Twitter bio.
Skewed follower/following numbers It could be 0 followers and 0 following with 3,000 tweets. It may be 0 followers and 2,936 following with 1 tweet. It potentially may be 568 followers and 0 following with 1 tweet (yes, some people auto-follow any account that follows them). Any way you slice it, if the numbers look screwy, it’s likely a bot.
Same tweet repeated at several accounts When reviewing a potential Twitter bot’s tweet stream, you might see the same tweet copied and pasted over and over and over again, each time directed at different Twitter accounts.
Zero “Listed” When reviewing another user’s Twitter profile, you can also see how many times that user has been listed by another. It’s very unlikely that a spam Twitter bot account has been listed.
Do you review another user’s Twitter profile before deciding whether or not to follow? What is something that will make you follow back right away?
ALWAYS check my “followers” to make sure that none of them are “bots”….. 😀
I always check their tweet stream. If the bulk of it is self promotion, I don’t follow back. If it’s a bot, i report as spam & block. If there’s a good amount of conversation with other people, I’ll follow back. If the account is private, I don’t follow back unless they engage in conversation with me.