How to Opt Out of Twitter Spam

I joined Twitter a little over a year ago and have been learning how to be a good twitizen ever since. I would follow people that were interesting or who were talking about topics that interested me.  When I first joined, it seemed to be populated mainly with real people but as time passed I started seeing twitter accounts that were automated.  I would follow someone and within seconds or minutes I received a direct message thanking me for following them. I know that Twitter has an API but I couldn’t imagine that everyone I was receiving the direct messages from knew how to do that.

After a little research I found Tweetlater and in a short while, I was contributing to the problem myself. I realized that everyone on Twitter must know about Tweetlater and were already using it. Eventually I got to the point that I was only receiving spam for direct messages and many of the tweeps that I followed were just twitterbots. My twitter experience was really suffering. So recently, i’ve started cleaning up my friends list removing bots, blocking spammers, and overall just trying to clean up my account. But I still get the usually inane “OMG, thanks so much for following me! Now go to my blog at http://www.we-can-both-make-so-much-freaking-money-together.com.”

I understand the motivation. For those individuals, Twitter is about networking, keeping in contact with your industry, and ultimately generating business. I don’t fault them for doing it. I do it and most of you do it too. But on the receiving end I still should be able to control it and since most of the automated stuff is not useful to me anyway, I was looking for a way to control it. Thats when I found it. You can opt-out of direct messages from Tweetlater.

Here is how:

1. login to twitter and follow @OptMeOut.
2. wait until you get the email saying @OptMeOut was following you back.
3. send a DM to @OptMeOut with any message you like.
4. now optionally unfollow @OptMeOut so that you won’t appear in the list of @OptMeOut followers.
5. you will receive a confirmation of the fact that you are fully opted out.

Thats it! For the original article on the Tweetlater.com site visit Tweetlater.com/optout.