How can I Keep Porn out of my Twitter Following?
If you are anything like me, you use Twitter as a tool for your business. It’s handy for communicating with people you know, invaluable for meeting people you never would have met otherwise, fantastic for learning and sharing, and much more.
Every Tweeter has a different strategy to build their following. Some people follow everyone they can, and end up with followers/following in the 10′s of thousands. For me, I am most interested in following people who are interesting, funny, intelligent, creative and in general, make my life richer. So, when I am looking for followers, I generally take a moment to see who they are following.
So when I land on a Twitter profile and see porn it’s a real turn-off. Not because I am a prude, but because it is a signal to me of one of the following:
- The Twitter member is using an auto-follow application and doesn’t really care who he/she follows, as long as the numbers are high.
- The Twitter member is not actively engaged and hasn’t been monitoring his/her profile.
Either way, it’s a red flag for me NOT to follow that person.
I have discovered that a Twitter tool called “Social Oomph” has a feature that lets me ignore anyone (person or robot) that includes certain words in their Tweet. Since I have set up this tool, I have seen a 90% reduction in porn spam.
Now, it could just be a coincidence, but from what I read, Twitter is getting a lot better at filtering porn out of the system as well.
What are your thoughts on Twitter porn? How do you handle it?
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I don’t auto follow anyone, and I don’t click on all my followers to see who they are. If they are porn or spammers, they get removed by Twitter generally. If I checked every person that is following me, there would be no time to get work done.
So in my opinion, you should care who people follow, not who is following them.
I do occassionally take an hour and go through my followers to get rid of bots, but only do it very infrequently. My time is better spent.
Just a different point of view!
Deborah, I totally can see your point of view. Because I monitor Twitter accounts for some of my clients, I am probably being more careful than the average tweeter. Plus, I have recently had to convince a number of business people who dropped their accounts because of porn and spam to give Twitter another try. I do see a huge reduction lately, thank goodness! Thanks for your comment.
I have not tried Socialoomph for auto follow except for a few hours. I may try it again with some filters.
Personally I review every new follower to see if I want to follow back. It takes a lot of time. I scan the last tweet for interesting information in the Twitter follow list, on interesting looking people, I go check out there profile page or follow them. I block new followers that have x rated pictures I do not want to see.
I unfollow people that tweet teeth whitening or Trump network and follow new people that my friends recommend.
Great idea to use a tool for auto follow with strict filters to save time.
@ClayFranklin
Great post. I do use auto follow, which I find to be a time-saver. But, I personally vet every new follower via the email notifications that I get from both Twitter and from http://www.socialtoo.com, which is my favorite Twitter client. Similar to what you suggest, @socialtoo has some great filters that I find remove a huge majority of spam that I get.
Thanks for the suggest, am sure it will be helpful to many!!
I scrupulously check my follower list every time I log in. Here is who I block immediately:
more followers
no pic
repetitive tweets
tooth whitening
sex/porn/britneybots
anyone who tweets how bored they are
I also take 1 minute to explore new people, read their tweets, check to make sure website is legit, stroll through their followers and make sure that they have something/ANYthing of interest to tweet about. Otherwise it is just noise.
Controlling the crap in twitter is the best way to benefit from all the amazing people here that are yours for the knowing. Enjoy!
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