Top 10 Signs You’re Not Worth Following on Twitter

Since I stopped auto-following people on Twitter, I’ve really been trying to weed out all the spammers from my follow list.

I’m still pondering whether I should do a big mass-unfollow and then re-build my list. I still might do so. I was ready to do it on Friday, but then Twitter got hit with that big DDOS attack and I couldn’t pull it off.

As I (at this point) gradually remove people from my follow list, I am beginning to arrive at common traits that I personally find either annoying or classic signs of a spammer. I thought I’d share.

Typical Twitter Spam

Here is what I’m finding a LOT of right now in the form of tweet spam:

1. Make money from home without lifting a finger. This can be, of course, phrased in multiple ways, but the end goal is the same. These people have a full profile of tweeting “make money” tweets, with little to no actual interaction with their audience. In short, their fishing for leads and you’re an idiot to follow people like this.
2. Teeth Whitening. I’m seeing a lot of people out there spamming about teeth whitening. I see it, you’re unfollowed. Period.
3. Getting More Followers. It is SO annoying because these people are complete FAKES. They have no idea what they’re doing with Twitter and all they ever talk about is how to get more followers. Many of these follow “services” end up tweeting ads for themselves via the API, and the Twitter user has given them permission to do so in order to themselves gain more followers. It is a classic Twitter ponzi scheme.

I’m also seeing crap about porn and Forex trading.

Top 10 Signs You’re Not Worth Following on Twitter

As I manually weed people out of my follow list, I have a pretty itchy trigger finger. I might get some choices wrong, however these are the top things I look for to tell me you’re not worth following:

1. You tweet any of the above spam.
2. You don’t have an avatar. That brown default avatar is, for me, classic sign of a spammer. If you’re not a spammer and you’re still using the default avatar, change it now because you’re in bad company.
3. Your avatar is sexy. You know, I’m a guy and I like a beautiful woman as much as any other guy. But, I don’t want to subscribe to it on Twitter. If your avatar is you simply advertising how much you want to get laid, then get lost from my Twitter account.
4. Your profile bio is stupid and offers no reason why I should follow you. A profile like “I like fun things” tells me nothing.
5. Your profile has nothing but links, with no personal interaction with your followers. If you’re just a one-way stream, you’re not using Twitter correctly and I won’t follow you.
6. You just tweet news or quotes. Sorry, I can get my news from anywhere and I don’t want AP headlines tweeted to me. And if all you do is tweet other people’s quotes, then you’re just telling me you let other people think for you, too. You offer no value. Buh-bye.
7. All you do is talk about stupid stuff like what you had for lunch. I like personal (non-business tweets), but at least be somewhat interesting and don’t make that the only thing your profile broadcasts.
8. You tweet in another language. Nothing personal here, I know not everybody speaks English. But, it wouldn’t make much sense for me to follow somebody I can’t understand.
9. Excessive Blip.FM links. I don’t CARE what music you listen to, and for me to click it and listen to a song is the biggest waste of time EVER.
10. Tweets with a lot of weird characters. Some people like to tweet endless amounts of people full of heart symbols and and other “wing dings”. No.

So, what do you think? Do you have other reasons for not following people? What do you look for when you decide whether or not to follow or not?

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