As I have said before, Twitter is great! But with great things there are always downsides. With Twitter, these downsides come in a couple forms.

The first and most obvious is that it can be a time drain. I don’t know how Robert Scoble has the time to follow 20,000 people on Twitter. According to one of his tweets today, he gets a tweet a second:

I just told @ev to turn off my autofollow script. 20,000 followers is enough. I’m seeing one new Tweet every second, I can’t deal with more.

If Twitter alone was your full time job, you still wouldn’t be able to keep up with such a barrage of tweets!

With a thousand things to get done every day, Twitter is the 1001st thing to keeps you from getting anything accomplished. This can be managed though, just don’t Twitter – get your work done instead. That’s why you won’t see me on Twitter sometime for days at a time. So that downside is pretty manageable.

However, there is a much more heinous downside: spam.

I happen to have a Twitter account that I do not even use and it still continues to gain followers – regardless of the fact that it never updates and has a total of 2 tweets ever. The growing trend in the Twitter world is following tens of thousands of people and hoping thousands follow you back – so you can just un-follow, rinse repeat.

To avoid being suckered by these spammers, some good advice is to thank them for following you and say hi. If there is no reply you can either choose to just not follow them or block. Another way to find these spammers, that may have replied to you but unfollowed you later. Twitter doesn’t have a “who unfollowed me” notification, although there is a cool little program called Twitter Karma that shows you who is just following you, who you just follow, and who is a mutual follower. Using this program is a great way to help manage your Twitter feeds and not get suckered by the spammers!