The 7 Most Effective ways to Deal with Twitter Direct Message Spam
Let’s face it, Spam sucks. It has plagued us for so many years through our personal and business email accounts. It tells us we should order viagra, it tells us we are fat, it even
contains malware that attempts to phish out your personal bank and social media login credentials.
The sad fact of the matter is that Spam is here to stay. As filtering algorithms get more and more sophisticated so does the methods in which spam is distributed. According to the State of Spam Monthly Report from Symantec, on average, 87 percent of all email messages sent in the month of October 2009, were Spam. It’s in our mailbox’s and it now plaques us in our social media presence.
If you find yourself frustrated by tons of Twitter Direct Message Spam here are a few simple alternatives to help you deal with this unproductive annoyance.
1. Unfollow All Followers – This would be the most simplest solution, but I would not advise it. They are so many great Tweeps out there that you run the risk of missing out on some good information. Not to mention you take on the status of one who takes but never gives back.
2. Turn off your Direct Message Emails – While this will not eliminate direct message spam completely, it will cut down on the number of email messages you have to sift through on a daily basis. Making it more feasible for you to actually read your legitimate emails.
3. Get a Twitter Manager – Use a third party Twitter manager such as Tweetdeck or Socialite to quickly filter your DMs. If your check your twitter account on a regular basis, having a third party manager will allow you to quickly skim over your direct messages and find the ones that truly interest you. Spammers are smart, but they are not too creative when it comes to making the actual spam messages. Many of them will follow a similar pattern and you will be able to quickly spot the ones that you really need to read.
4. Don’t read your DMs – Make it public to your users that you do not read your DMs and offer them an email with pretty decent spam filter protection – such as gmail. Put your email on your twitter background. This makes it much harder for spammers to target you, because many of the custom spammer programs do not have OCR functionality built into them. While this is possible it becomes very costly for spammers to scan every tweeps’ background for emails, not to mention it would be pretty fruitless for the spammer due to the time constraints and relatively small returns from emails collected.
5. Block the user(s)- if someone is spamming you with such promises of getting 20,000 followers in 3 days and they have only 20 followers. Block the user. If enough users block the spammer, Twitter will eventually take notice and suspend the account.
6. Become a Hermit – Make your tweets private, if you are into twitter just for connecting with friends and family – you know beyond the virtual realm – this option may seem to offer you the best chance for spam freedom. By making your twitter feed private you are in control of who will and will not be able to DM you.
7. Use the Spam button - If you notice that your are receiving spam from certain character and you are 100 percent certain that they are truly a spammer and not the victim of credential theft. Go to the user’s account and fire off the spam button. From here you will be asked to confirm your decision and the user account will be flagged for review.
11 Responses to “The 7 Most Effective ways to Deal with Twitter Direct Message Spam”
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by michael_duvall: The 7 Most Effective ways to Deal with Twitter Direct Message Spam http://bit.ly/6jrL0t Twitter Tips…
Excellent Topic Michael, I really hate all spam, but it is a part of our virtual worlds.
Thank you. yeah its a real bummer sometimes.
Thank you for adding this, I can’t stand all the spam I get from twitter. No I don’t want to watch britney spears do her evil deeds, no I don’t want to get 1 million follows in 5 days and no that is not me at that shady link!!
Here’s another way:
http://davidwees.com/content/using-filters-gmail-automatically-move-now-following-you-twitter-messages-out-your-inbox
Filter the spam. So much of the spam is repetitive, I find a simple “if your DM contains this text then I delete it” type filter works great. Of course I’m using Gmail where setting up such filters is incredibly easy.
Thank you for the link David, I agree this is good way to get rid of the twitter DM spam for gmail users. I use a similar process on my mac.
You forgot the best way there is: Use a site like socialtoo.com to block the spam before it hits your DM box.
Thanks for including the link to SocialToo. It’s been a long time since I used that app, I almost completely forgot about it’s value.
Great post! I?m just starting out in community management/marketing media and trying to learn how to do it well – resources like this article are incredibly helpful. As our company is based in the US, it?s all a bit new to us. The example above is something that I worry about as well, how to show your own genuine enthusiasm and share the fact that your product is useful in that case
I hate SPAM!! its everywhere, but I guess its a tradeoff of sorts.
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