The 5 Step Twitter Maintenance Guide

This week started to notice weird spam accounts Tweeting to my Twitter feed and since I check everyone I follow, I had a feeling some random application out there was adding these SPAM accounts, most likely an application that I had tested out and gave my password too (naughty, naughty me).

So I’ve been motivated into doing the following 5 steps for a major Twitter maintenance:

1. Remove SPAM Accounts

Register yourself a free trial of Twitsweeper. This great little tool checks and removes followers that just Spam and does it so easily. What I love is there are 3 levels of automation: Full, Auto Remove after 72 hours or Manual. Twitsweeper suggested I had 250 spammy accounts (where did the rascals come from?) and I checked a bunch to make sure that they were infact spam.

They’ve done a great job with their filters and hopefully they’ll add the ability to check your following list so I’ll never see another tweet about teeth whitening or improving my downline with Donald Trump.  Tweet them to add this at @twitsweeper.

2. Remove Inactive Followers

UnTweeps is a free service that let’s you bulk unfollow accounts that have been inactive for over 30 days. It has a Whitelist so you can give your favourites a free pass, however, I’m pretty ruthless – yeah maybe they could be on vacation, in the hospital or have a legitimate reason for not tweeting, but more likely they are just lazy. Get rid of them.

3. Back up your Twitter Account

Get yourself a free account with Backupify (until Feb 15th) and start automatically backing up your Twitter account (and Facebook, Wordpress and a bunch of others) daily to Amazon Web Services. Once you set it up, it will run daily.

4. Remove connections to your Twitter account.

Each time you use OAuth to authenticate an external application with Twitter, it adds a connection to your account. Since I test out a lot of Twitter apps, I suspect that this could be one of the possible culprits for how I mysteriously follow rogue spam accounts.

Either way, it’s good practice to regularly remove connections you aren’t using or you don’t 100% trust with your first born’s life. Visit Twitter Connections and remove them all – don’t worry they’ll reconnect again when you reuse the service.

5. Change your password

Ah yes, we all hate doing it, but it’s really the best way to protect your Twitter Account from being hijacked. There’s a reason I put this one last too – because since we’ve used services external from Twitter, by removing the connections and changing our password last you’ve ensured the services you used in the previous steps won’t have access to your account unless you reinstate them.

Twitter password change

Repeat regularly for a squeaky clean, protected Twitter account.