I am changing my approach to Twitter.

My former ways

At first it was about playing with the API and studying the response rate to my aggressive follows and link postings.

I wrote a command line tool that helps me find and follow people. A certain number of them would follow back. (I don’t recommend this approach, and I won’t give away my code.)

I would find tweeps based on words specific to my web design industry so I was more likely to find my professional peers. Competitors, in a way, but ultimately a valuable knowledge base and community.

Find unfollowers

My tool then reported on who didn’t reciprocate my follow. It then unfollowed those people.

And did it all again until my API limit ran out. Did it a couple times a day. Really piled up the followers.

About the unfollowing, honestly, people don’t know each other well enough and shouldn’t take it seriously. I followed strangers; I unfollowed strangers who didn’t care about me either. Who cares. If I was a jerk I would be lazy about unfollowing and just unfollow everyone. Then only the reciprocators would be left. But they aren’t suckers. I valued that they followed back. Seriously. So I made sure to return the favor.

My follow bot was aggressive. It followed people who didn’t want to be followed. Every once in a while I would get the DM “who the f&%^ are you?” Fair enough, a#@hole.

False value

After a certain number of followers was achieved, I started to look like I was worth following. This is why people cannot be judged on follower count. There are all kinds of ways to get lots of followers. Mostly misguided. Follower count and value are unrelated. Look at some of these celebs. Turns out they are boring and retarded.

The good thing about suddenly having lots of real people followers is that the likelihood of interesting interaction increases substantially. Most will ignore you. Sorry. They don’t care about your breakfast. They have real jobs.

Accidental friends

Fortunately you’ll accidentally find cool people too that will interact with you like a normal person. Get a few thousand and say something. It’s like yelling in a church. Fun to see who yells back. Because I was doing this at night in California, I tended to connect with lots of waking Australians. I like Australians, especially now.

Spam makes it suck

And one definitely accidentally finds lots of spammers. Before I knew it, Twitter was useless. Too much noise. So many spammers and scammers from who knows where.

“Increase your follower count”, “get rich online”, “whiten your teeth”, “buy acai berries”, and the legions of “social media consultants”. All trash.

Sure, Tweetdeck helped group the valuable people, but I couldn’t group them fast enough. Now there is a iPhone app, but before that it was inconvenient only having the grouping on one of three computers.

My new way

So, as I was saying, I have reversed my approach. Now it’s about finding and unfollowing spammers in an attempt to make Twitter usable. They’ve done so many enhancements to the UI that one hardly needs an app anymore. I kind of want to play with those new built in features.

How I hunt

The first step in the spammer unfollow process is to look for the scammy phrases above. No time for any of them. Unfollow mercilessly.

Then look for anyone pushing products I don’t care about. And anyone otherwise selling their tweets. Magpie. Unfollow.

Then go to the “Following” list and look at people’s “Name”’s. In my case, I had so many spammers, I could clearly notice duplicate names. Jamessunny, Johngoogle, ToomerJean, Davidpast, WozniakSteve, coodald, Zambrano Carlos, and TorvaldsLinus were popular ones. I got a lot of mileage by blindly unfollowing people.

Then compare the name to the picture. Man name with a female photo? Unfollow.

Then look at the usernames. Apply the spam phrases to the names. Matches? Unfollow.

After staying up late and unfollowing over 400 accounts, which was just scratching the surface, I am now at the point where I am watching my “Home” feed and waiting for anyone else to spam up.

The ones who tweet 10 times all at once are just asking for it. Unfollow.

At this point the tweets start looking like normal people. Now wait for the stupid ones to come out. Unfollow.

When the dust settles, I am sure I am losing followers by changing my policy. These fakes have auto-unfollow enabled in tools such as SocialToo. I know I did. Not anymore.

Clean the stream

I am cleaning the stream. I want to connect now. It’s not about numbers anymore.

Let’s see what it’s worth. And when I say “worth,” I’m not talking money. And those who are talking money… watch out. I am on the hunt.