Identifying Twitter Spam

Twitter is a pretty neat invention. Like most great ideas though, as soon as there are lots of people in one place, some lazy marketer decides that spam will work and starts the inevitable struggle between good and evil. Like viruses and anti-virus software, or cops and robbers, everything in the spam world continues to improve. Just like the Nigerian 419, the object is still the same--- hit as many people as possible, try to fly under the radar, and try to look legit. So how does one look legit on Twitter? Nowadays, if you have a tweet history of more than 15 tweets, you've changed your profile picture to something other than the default, and you have a girls name instead of a random character string--- you're doing better than most. ---But that's what some actual users look like, so how does the average person distinguish? Content. The following are screenshots of some wonderful people who have started following me in the last little while. I'm sure they're great people, except--- wait a minute?!-- they only talk about one topic and always have a link. Most normal people (like my sister) when they started using twitter they asked open ended questions, they fumbled with over-sharing about breakfast--- they didn't immediately start recommending great articles (links) about tooth whitening, mortgages, insurance, credit cards, etc... Content is the easiest way to identify a spammer from the average user. Have a look at these and you'll see what I mean:

 Oh, and then there's the spammers that don't even change up the pictures they stole...

You'll notice a lot of people follow these spammers.  That's the sad thing.  Twitter has become an ecosystem of monitoring, management and engagement tools for watching, screening, validating, auto-following, auto-responding, auto-unfollowing, and more...  This means that the spammers can get 1000 followers just by following 2000 of the right people...   Sad isn't it...

What other tricks have you seen spammers do either on Twitter, or other social platforms...?   @andrewkinnear