What are these Twitter Accounts? Spam Followers

Recently I noticed that I was being followed by these accounts with no profile images and, more surprisingly, no tweets. I wonder what they are for. I don’t know the answer but if you have some ideas about what these spam followers are up to, why not let us know in the comments.

Spam Followers on Twitter

Spam Followers

I think I would classify them as spam followers. They haven’t spammed me with direct messages or tweets but I do get notifications telling me I have a new follower which I check to see whether I should follow them back or not. Well, now I don’t check because they are fairly recognizable but I do open the email. The twitter follower is not such a big deal despite the fact that it is not a true follower. I suspect the vast majority of followers don’t ever check their Twitter accounts anyway so we never really know the number of true followers.

The only thing I can think of is that they are building these accounts to sell to people who can just change the name and have instant followers. I’m not sure how effective that would be as a marketing strategy but perhaps there is some statistic that shows that the more followers you have the more like it is that someone will follow you?

Identify your spam followers

After a quick search of Google I found a tool called TwitBlock that analyses your Twitter followers and judges whether they are spam followers or not. I didn’t use it to block any account but in one of my Twitter accounts it identified 9 out of 180 as possible spam accounts. That doesn’t seem to bad really.

What do you think?

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