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How to spot a Twitter follow bot

It's not that hard frankly! I've attached a graph showing the last three months of followers and following for the @web_cardiff account, and you can see the pattern clearly: The green line is the bot. It follows a bunch, waits a few days and unfollows those who didn't follow back. Repeat. (My graph isn't 100% accurate, but you can see the numbers for yourself: followers / 'friends'.)

What do you think? Is this bad practice? In this case, the information isn't bad - a few links go to the owner's site, but most point to genuinely useful resources. Friendly spam or useful resource worth promoting in this way?

Comments (1)

Nov 02, 2009
Foomandoonian said...
Heh. Just as I posted this @hotdogsladies made a similar point with a classic Merlin Mannerism:

"Following 50k people is an effective way to bulid relationships with anyone who's dim enough to believe you read over 1,000,000 toots a day."

http://twitter.com/hotdogsladies/status/5371918869

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