Unfollowing, Blocking, and Reporting for Spam

If you don’t want a particular person to follow you — perhaps because you don’t want to be associated with them, or they’re a little creepy — you can block them. Blocking’s a bit drastic. Perhaps you just don’t want to see their tweets anymore. You may just want to unfollow them. To unfollow a user, go to your main Twitter page and click the “Following” link and select “View as a List of People.” This brings you to a list of the people you are following.

Figure 49 — Unfollowing People on Twitter

Find the person you want to unfollow, and click the Follow button to unfollow them. You can also use the dropdown to see various actions you can take, including mentioning, adding to a list, blocking, and reporting them.

If you really want to block the person from following you, you can select “Block.” The block takes immediate effect, although you’ll see an Undo link in the listing if you change your mind. You can also block a user by visiting their Twitter page and clicking “Block.”

Twitter doesn’t notify the blocked user, although they may notice they no longer can view your tweets in their timeline, but they will be able to view them on your public profile page. The main benefit is that they can no longer direct message you (we discuss direct messaging in the next section.) If the blocked user tries to follow your tweets again, Twitter displays a message similar to the following figure.

Figure 50 — Twitter Blocked User Message

You may also want to report users for spamming. This is a good idea if, for example, you and another user are mutually following each other, and they start direct messaging spam to your account.

Here’s what Twitter considers to be spamming behavior:

• Posting harmful links (including links to phishing or malware sites)
• Abusing the @reply function to post unwanted messages to users
• Creating lots of accounts or using automated tools to create multiple accounts
• Spamming trending topics to try to grab attention
• Repeatedly posting duplicate updates
• Posting links with unrelated tweets
• Aggressive following behavior (for instance, mass following and un-following in order to gain attention)

To report this type of abuse, select Report for Spam either in your list of followers or on the user’s Twitter page. Reporting a user blocks them from following you and flags them for Twitter to review. A single report is not likely to cause Twitter to take action against the accused spammer. Here’s Twitter’s current statement about reporting spammers:

Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team looks at user reports of spam in combination with other signals for spam investigation. You may not immediately or definitely see this account suspended. Once you’ve reported an account as spam, it is no longer able to follow you or reply to you.

Create Twitter Lists

A great way to get people to follow you is to create a Twitter list in your account. A list is nothing more than a group of people you follow that you give a name. So for example, if you like the tweets of @abc and @mno because they are talking about water filters, create a list called Water_Filters and add these accounts to it.

It’s easy to do. Go to your account on the Twitter Website, and select the Profile button. At the top of the page you’ll see a button called Lists.

Figure 46 — Creating a Twitter List — List Button

Click New list. You’ll see a box to fill in a name and description for the list, and to determine if it’s a public or a private (only you can see) list.

Figure 47 — Naming a Twitter List

Click Create list, and Twitter creates the list. Now you can to add followers (your tweeps) or others to the list on the next menu similar to the next figure.

Figure 48 — Adding People to a Twitter List

After you do a search, you can easily add people to your list.

Each list is currently limited to 500 people, and you can create a maximum of 20 lists. When you view your list, you see the tweets from the people who are members of the list rather than a list of members. Those who you add to your list are passively notified that they are on a list, if it’s public. They may notice at the top of their Twitter profile page, next to the lists indicating the number of tweet, number of followers and number they are following, that the number of lists they are on has increased.

If you’ve created a public list, and if your followers find it interesting, they may follow your list as well. Similarly, if someone just happens to be browsing your Twitter profile, and they see a list they like, they may follow you and the list. Your list also can be found on some Twitter Directories, like Listorious (see the upcoming post Power Tool: WeFollow and Other Twitter Directories for more information about Twitter directories.

Whether you use the much-improved Twitter Webpage or one of these applications, you’ll want to start out by following interesting people. Following means you will see their tweets in your timeline, similar to the following figure:

Figure 44 — Example Twitter Timeline

You can start by following us: @smpgcom. If you know a person’s Twitter handle, you can go to their page on the Web by typing twitter.com followed by a slash and their handle, without the @ sign. For example, here we are: twitter.com/smpgcom.

One thing you’ll find out once you start following people is that you’ll magically get some followers of your own. That’s because not only are your tweets now showing up on your followers’ sites, but many people track new followers of people they follow, and decide to also follow. In general, the more people you follow, the more will follow you back. You can find likely people to follow by searching for keywords that interest you. We discuss Twitter search in more detail in the upcoming post Searching on Twitter.

When you’re ready to send out your first tweet, start by saying something about what you’re interested in. Just try not to make it about your cat, going up stairs, or how long the line at Starbucks is.

Incidentally, your followers are called tweeps, not twits.

Follow to Get Followed

As we said above, the best way to get followers is to follow others. Then watch their Twitter stream and you’re likely to find other interesting people to follow, who might also follow you back. Of course, you should include your Twitter handle in your email signature and in other promotional materials.

Another handy way to find people to follow and encourage people to follow you is to use Follow Friday. This is a tradition on Twitter. Every Friday people recommend other tweeps as good people to follow by posting recommendations and including a hashtag, which is a quick way to create a keyword by putting a hash, or pound, sign at the beginning of a word or phrase (no spaces). In this case, people use the hashtags #ff, #followfriday, and a few others to mark their posts recommending cool people to follow. (There’s more on hashtags in the upcoming post Use Hashtags.) Other people search for these tags and often check out the people recommended. Here’s a recent sample of Follow Friday activity:

Figure 45 — Example of Follow Friday

Since you’re new at Twitter, it’s not likely anyone is going to recommend you via Follow Friday just yet. So start off by recommending others. People will be curious about you, and if you’ve created a good profile, they may decide to start following you. Of course it helps if you have a few interesting, pithy posts under your belt before you try this.

Managing Your Accounts

Once you have an account, you can use it directly from the Website or via a variety of desktop tools, including:

• Tweetdeck[1]
• Seesmic Ping[2]
• HootSuite[3]

These applications allow you to more easily filter and sort your Twitter stream. And after you’ve started following more than a dozen tweeps, you’re going to need one of these apps to keep things straight. You can create sections in each of these tools that enable you to follow one or more people specifically, monitor a recurring Twitter search, and they also enable you to post, reply, and retweet using your own Twitter account.

Bought for $40 million in mid-2011 by Twitter itself, Tweetdeck dominates the desktop Twitter/social networking market with Hootsuite (which acquired Seesmic Ping in September 2012 and appears to be targeting mobile phones with the app) close behind. All three are fighting for visibility on iPhone and Android phones.

Each of the tools we mentioned allows you to set up columns representing a particular social media feed — your Twitter stream, Facebook stream, and perhaps a Twitter list as well as monitoring a particular keyword search. HootSuite’s approach is a bit different, running in a Web browser, or integrating into the Firefox browser as a clickable widget, enabling you to monitor your Twitter feed wherever you are. Currently, HootSuite is winning the arms race, supporting the largest number of social networks.

TweetDeck is nice, but its little chirp sound effect when a new post comes in drives us crazy. Each of these platforms have their good points, and we use all of them at different times for different reasons.