Twitter: Pornography & Spam vs. Quality Contacts

I lost about a hundred Twitter followers over the holidays. “Alice” was on Christmas break, and I didn’t have time to review my new followers to decide if I wanted to follow them back.

I check every Twitter profile before I manually follow back, making it is easy for me to fall behind. I definitely do lose a few contacts that way. Some new Twitter followers will unfollow you in as a little as two days if you don’t return the follow. Of course, some of these can be spam bots (software applications running automated tweets) who I couldn’t be in any real “conversation” with anyway.

Many people who use Twitter simply follow everyone back who follows them, and you can completely automate this process. Last fall I briefly tried autofollowing, but, to my shock and surprise, that approach resulted in pornography polluting my Twitter stream. I hate having that junk on my computer screen, and I don’t even want to see it accidentally. Further, autofollowing resulted in a lot of unwanted spam about affiliate marketing and not paying for white teeth.

So I opted to go through all my followers and everyone I was following one by one and manually unfollow and block unwanted contacts. Since then, I’ve been sticking with individual manual vetting. It does take some time, but I actually like to see who is following me,  so I can make my connections as productive as possible. Most of the time when I follow someone who is following me, I add the person to one of the groups I’ve set up to organize and categorize my Twitter contacts. Manually adding new followers into groups also is a little time consuming but worth it. After all, I am looking for quality (versus quantity) contacts.

Am I crazy to manually follow? How do you manage Twitter’s spam and pornography problem?

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