How would you know if your follower in twitter is a spam?

what is twitter?

You can generally tell if your follower is real by looking at their twitter stream. If all they tweet is “omg porn” or “I have hot pix”, they are spam. And you can follow the Twitter spam folks (I’ll grab their name in a moment), they’ll follow you back, and you can DM the suspected spammer’s name to them and they’ll look into it.

They could be a commercial user (an eatery or, I don’t know, t-shirt store) that promotes on Twitter and for some reason things you’d be interested and that is why they followed you. Or is interested in you. On Twitter I’d say block ‘em if you don’t like ‘em, but they could be legit users.

Finally if they have full, well used twitter streams that aren’t all “see my porn pix” or “buy viagra” or whatever and details someone’s life or interactions, they’re probably a real person.

As an example for the middle one, a local eatery follows my foodie twitter stream because I tweet about food. Yes, theirs is used professionally, yes they only tweet about their food, promotions, stuff like that, but it is appropriate for them to follow a foodie tweet, as they are a foodie place. You know? They aren’t trying to spam.

At the same time, there are people who fall below one and two who might be trying to promote their stuff using Twitter appropriately, but haven’t quite figured out what that means.

some are spam, im pretty sure Britneyvids is a bot or something fake. Its funny to me.

It’s Spam.

There’s really no reason to care if the people following you are spam. Them following you doesn’t cause their spam to be seen by you – you have to follow them to see it.

You can also tell if a user is a spammer from their stats.

Here’s an extreme example of a spam-type person:
Following: 3000
Followers: 2
Updates: 20

Then you look at their 20 updates and this is what you see:

They don’t contain a single @reply to anyone
All 20 link to exactly the same URL…

…which claims to tell you “How to get 10,000 followers in 5 minutes”

You don’t have to block this person unless they have an offensive avatar, because it does no harm to let them follow you. If you don’t follow them back they’ll probably unfollow you in a couple of days anyhow :)

You can tell when they have some ridiculous sn like @realestatepro or something like that and their stream is full of self promotions. They tend to not have an avatar too.

I’m on Twitter @thaoly

follow-up question, how would you know when a member of a twitter joined twitter?

Why care? You have a follower! Yay! Congratulations!