In order to achieve the elimination of Twitter spam bots, I've engaged ManageFlitter. This is a handy utility that is now fully manual. It used to be automatic but Twitter decided automation was not to be recommended - not without reason. Thus I'm now weeding through my Twitter accounts trying to eliminate all the spam bots my accounts have acquired.
Back in the bad old days, I used automatic follower adders to add Twitter followers, not really caring much whether the followers were worthwhile or not as I figured there must be a few good apples amidst the bad. Since then my thinking has changed. @EmeraldEspinoza had 3916 accounts that it was following and 3865 that were following back. Today using ManageFlitter, this has been reduced by 1,000 accounts that were either spam, tweeted only in a foreign language, had no personalization at all or had been inactive for 30+ days. I shall rerun this over the next few days until all the garbage accounts are gone from the list that I am following.
My theory is that if I stop following all the garbage accounts and stop following people back automatically, I should be able to see what the health of the account is. Emerald's Gazette has had just 17 views to date which would indicate that it's not reaching real people and I suspect followers may well be put off by two things - the number of spam accounts I'm following back and the fact that my auto-tweeter goes off 20 times a day. I need to reduce that to about 4 times daily so that I have just five daily tweets. That keeps the account alive.
Really and truly, I have too many Twitter accounts as I'd set them all on automatic. Automatic broadcasts, automatic follower adders etc. I doubt there was a single genuine reader. I'm slowly working through them all with my new philosophy that if people want to follow they can but giving people a reason to want to follow which is the automatically generated daily newspaper. I'm also planning to interact a bit more too - even if it means I have to monitor half a dozen Twitter accounts.
The goal? Simply to get more readers for my blogs. More readers is just pure fun. I have no idea how many readers I get at the moment. Most of the time the comment section is devoid of genuine comments. Thus either everybody agrees with what I say or nobody is reading despite what the hit counters (none of which agree on figures) are telling me.
So, the new model - eliminate the junk accounts that I'm following on Twitter. Reduce automatic tweets to a minimum. Use automatically generated daily newspapers to encourage interest in both blogs and the newspapers. Respond to genuine Twitter followers. Hope that the new rules of engagement increase blog popularity. Of course this philosophy will be followed through with all the existing Twitter accounts. Indeed, if some have no following at all (which is likely) they might get eliminated. To that end, today I unfollowed about 4,300 accounts that hadn't tweeted in the last 30 days, didn't tweet in English, were identified as spam accounts or had no profile image. I expect the bots will still follow me now that auto follow/unfollow has been disabled. I don't care about the bots - they're non-human so as long as they don't annoy me, they can follow me.
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