You probably wonder what friends have to do with spam, right? After all, friends are the guys from whom you would welcome any type of communications, be it an email or phone call or in-person chat in a bar.
And usually this is true. But today we are talking about other meaning of a word “friend”.
About the way this word is used in social networks. Where “friend” simply means a fellow with whom you’ve established a two-way message exchange.
You add them as friends to your social networks, and after a while they can become your friends in real life, not just in a virtual world.
I realize that referring to friends with two different meanings within one article could be a little confusing, so from now on let’s just call your friends from social networks “social friends”. And leave the word “friend” its initial and noble meaning.
Usually the more social friends you have the better. It means you can communicate with more people, and get your message seen by more eye balls. Which naturally turns into more traffic to your website, and more conversions.
However sometimes you can end up with a friend who is throwing too many advertisement at you. And since reading the same info again and again is a pure waste of your time, you most likely will un-follow such social friend rather quickly.
But what should you do if this guy already trashed your inbox in the social network with hundreds and hundreds of messages?
It would be certainly a pain to go in and try to delete those messages manually, one-by-one.
Well, there are effective anti-spam solutions, and they differ from network to network.
Today we’ll see how we can eliminate spam in twitter. Twitter is a very popular social network, and as you can see in my twitter counter, as of today I have close to 10,000 followers.
With this relatively big number of followers there is a high probability that some of them would try to spam me. And some of them do try. In fact, one of the ” social friends” automatically sent me 488 messages?!!! Can you believe this?
So I had to find the solution and figure out how to deal with this mess. Of course I un-followed this person, and blocked his account, but it was too late. Damage was done. Twitter doesn’t provide an easy way to delete direct messages (DMs) for short, so it would take me hours to delete all this spam.
But there is an easy solution that allowed me to delete those 488 spam messages in a matter of seconds. It’s a bookmark add-on called DM Whacker. You can read all the details and get this tool here
Basically, you just drag the link found on this page to your Firefox browser, login to your twitter account, and choose which particular twitter user you would like to delete – and voila- job is done.
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