This morning I found a number of new accounts following me, but they all tweet spam. Now, I’m not following them back, so their spam isn’t quite bothering me, but I still want to block them from following me. Is there an easy way to do this?

As with all messaging platforms, spammers can be a bit of a problem on Twitter. They saturate the medium with their attempts to get your to buy their wares and increase the noise you get on the channel. Twitter is actually a pretty good medium for this, as you get to choose who you follow, and if someone starts to spam you, you can just block them. And there are also a number of tools that can help you clean up your follower list, to make sure you get as far away from it as possible.

One such service is TwitBlock which lets you scan your account and reports which of your followers are liable to be spammers. It uses a number of criteria to figure this out, in particular:

1. Ignore factor (%age who don’t follow back)
2. Stalking rate (avg per day who don’t follow back)
3. Blocked by other TwitBlock users
4. Same profile pic as blocked accounts
5. Tweets via API
6. Missing profile fields
7. Username looks randomly generated
8. Spammy words in bio

The higher an account score on those counts, the higher the chance that it may be a rogue account. So before you start getting tweets to buy pharmaceuticals, sdram or other bits and pieces, check out TwitBlock and see exactly who’s following you.