At SocialToo, my biggest priority is to do all that we can to make Twitter a better, more “social” place for you. Our goal is to do all we can to enable you to focus on connecting with your friends and building relationships, while we handle the rest. Unfortunately, with those that abuse the system and seek to solely focus on gaining followers, it gets harder to do so.
One of the most heavily-used techniques for gaining followers by spammers is to follow people on Twitter, then, quickly unfollow them once those people auto-follow them back. Some people do this via services like SocialToo.com, while others do it manually, but regardless, it’s easy to gain a lot of followers you could potentially target for spam in the future using this technique. I’ve referred to this flaw in Twitter’s system a “free no-reply address” given to each user that joins Twitter.
Last week we launched a feature enabling you to block automatic DMs from other SocialToo accounts. Through this feature, only those that want to receive auto-generated DMs will receive them, providing more targeted marketing, and less unwanted messages for those that are annoyed by the feature. Tonight, I’m proud to announce a new feature that will further this effort to ward off spam on Twitter. I think this is game changing.
Starting tonight, if you log into your SocialToo.com account and click on the “Admin” tab, you’ll see a new link on the left titled, “Unfollowing Preferences”. You still have the usual features of being able to unfollow all those that unfollow you, or just leave them alone, but we’re adding one new feature. Now, if you opt to enable it, you can specify that we unfollow anyone who unfollows you within the first “x” number of days after they follow you. We default this to 1, as that is common for spammers, but you can fine-tune it for your needs.
Also starting tonight, we are defaulting this to “on” for all new SocialToo.com users in an effort to further fight these types of spamming efforts on Twitter. Existing users will keep their existing settings, so please go in and adjust this if you are already a user. We plan on expanding this even further in the future with some free, and possibly some premium features, but now you can feel safe that, so long as you and your friends are on SocialToo, Twitter will be a less-spammy place! So go out and invite your friends, encourage them to switch to SocialToo.com to discourage these spammers from using this technique. The more of you that use SocialToo, the more effective we will be at fighting this technique!
Photo Credit: freezelight