NEWS

How Those Amazingly Popular Twitter Users Can Reduce Their Risk

So you opened your Twitter account and after a few weeks you only had those 20 or 30 people that know you at work following you - how embarrassing for someone as important and popular as you. Frustrated you signed up for one of those services that promised you thousands of followers so you could look really important. Didn't you realize that by signing on to that service it would also cause you to automatically follow those who now follow you as well? Now you don't understand why you are getting so many SPAM Direct Messages or a few that also direct you to fake Twitter login pages in an attempt to steal your login credentials or that direct you to malware laden web sites.

For those "regular guys" with thousands of followers that want to reduce their risk of getting phished or exposed to malware on Twitter try the following rather unique however ego shrinking approach:

1. Cancel your subscription to the I am a really important Twitter user follower service
2. Trim your list of people you follow to those that offer content that you actually have an interest in.
3. Trim the List of people that follow you to people you actually know and that you don't have an issue sharing your life with

Not to worry you will still be included in the Public Timeline and your Tweets will still be included in searches - so if you actually say something of value it can still be found.

Reality Check

Even if you clean up you Twitter subscription lists it only takes one of those people that you follow that still happens to belong to a "follower" service to potentially cause a bogus DM to be sent to your Twitter account.

The entertainment aspect of popular Twitter users:

Looking in to some of the followers for a user with thousands of them can be both entertaining and embarrassingly revealing. One of the clear signs of someone using a Twitter follower service is finding a person with thousands of followers that is not a Hollywood regular, a published author or perhaps a known political figure.  Another is when the thousands of people that are following them is strangely nearly equal to the thousands of people they are following.  I have also noticed that any Twitter user that within their list of followers has users with those semi nude profile photos and their name is strangely followed by 3 numeric digits - makes that user automatically suspect of being part of a Twitter follower service. My personal favorite is when you dig a little deeper and look at some of their followers details to find that they themselves also are following thousands of Twitter users but in the past year they have only sent 8 Tweets themselves and they covered such interesting subjects as how much money they are saving using the $5 method they found for whitening their teeth or perhaps how you can see the rest of their private photo gallery by clicking on the included URL.