Note another reason for monitoring fake followers and deleting them when found is so that one can make sense of graphs showing trends in the number of followers, such as understanding the growth in the number of followers which took place on 10 and 11 July 2012, according to Twitter Counter.

It seems this coincided with my attendance at the OR 2012 conference and my post about the opening plenary talk. I can be reasonably confident about this as I tend to monitor sudden influxes on new followers.

Initially, like you I wasn’t too concerned about spam followers. But as institutions make greater use of tools such as Twitter they will have an interest in how well-used the service are and are likely to make use of social analytic tools to monitor their services. There will therefore be a need to understand the dark aspects of their social networks, especially if they commission new media agencies to grow their networks!

But the post suggests there may be a need for monitoring followers and avoiding unethical approaches to grow the number of followers and be proactive in blocking spam followers. I am using lightweight approaches to blocking spam followers in order that I have a better understanding of my network – e.g. so that I know that the visualisation of my Twitter network correctly depicts my engagement with a Spanish community and not the presence of a significant Spanish spam network.

In addition I would hope that we will see community action in blocking spammers will help to have them blocked more quickly, thus undermining their business model, When I receive spam messages in the @mention column in TweetDeck, I click on the Block and Report Spam button. If large numbers of people do this as soon as they see such spam, it will help to have spam accounts disabled more quickly.

Does that make sense?