We know that some of the most common problems with twitter nowadays is the existence of automated accounts (bots) that make too much noise and muddle up the conversation.
Twitter has already taken action identifying and deleting potential bots from the platform’s user base. Although some accounts operate to some level of automation based on legitimate triggers that were created with a specific purpose in mind (customer support, alerts, etc), other automated accounts (bots) have somewhat malicious objectives.
We aim to help you identify the latter.
Audiense Connect allows you to comb through different profiles using a variety of criteria to make the process of finding potential bots easy.
This is how it works:
Once we have the target audience generated on our dashboard, we go into My Community and use the following filters to sieve out the bots.
Firstly, we focus on the number of tweets per day, where 10 to 15 will give us a much higher than usual activity.
To avoid including media outlets, we exclude verified accounts.
A high following/follower ratio (they follow significantly more accounts than they are followed by) will also help us identify suspicious accounts.
Lastly, we can filter by when the account was created. Assuming Twitter cleared most of the bots this year, all new bots won’t be more than a year old.
You can play around with all these criteria to make sure bots don’t affect your social media presence. Although this method won’t find 100% of the all the accounts, it provides you with a good stepping stone. You can also save the filter to use these on any other reports.
