Having a town in a our twitter name, it’s no surprise we take a keen interest in all things Altrincham or #altrincham (NOTE: the former actually widens out the search from the hashtag alone)
And like many towns as twitter gets ever busier, so does the local town twitter search
It can be frustrating when the core reason for searching your town is to find out what’s going on local whether it be local restaurants, retail, business blogs and local news …. and interspersed is a lot of unecessary noise and spam
Below we present the guide to making your own towns twitter search useable again and that source of joy it was before it got too noisy and too spammy
SUGGESTED BLOCK LIST
The easiest way to make your local twitter search more user friendly is to use the Block Button on Twitter
1st we outline the 10 types of twitter account to block to reclaim your own twitter search … and then we tell you how to block an offending twitter account
Please note this is not aimed at genuine businesses or locals – it’s aimed at autobots and spammers
1. Porn Feeds
We’re not prudes, but to be realistic a local town hashtag isn’t where anybody is looking to get their sexual kicks
2. Escort Feeds
Again – see porn feeds for reason why
3. Local Town Hashtag RTs feeds i.e @altyretweet @ChorltonRT @Knutsfordrt
If you’re looking at the local town search then you will see the original tweet of what the Retweet account is retweeting
If you didn’t already know these accounts are autobots – they are not run day to day by real people
4. Job / Recruitment Companies – that post 20 jobs in a row
Twitter can be great for local businesses recruiting local staff, we retweet these businesses, but automated feeds from job directories with a machine gun approach – no thanks
5. Companies House Address books i.e the endless stream of “Find out which companies are based at”
No, we never have wondered how many businesses are in xxx address … if we wanted to know this we’d contact a databroker direct
6. Clocks
We’re on a phone or a PC which has the time on – we don’t need to see a tweet every hour with the time on
7. Weather Bots
Oh – we have a window and eyes to tell us what the weather is currently doing
8. Business Directories – that post “you’re now added on our website #localtownhashtag 20 times in a row)
It’s nice for the company itself to know they’re added to a business directory, but the whole town doesn’t need to know multiple times
9. Trolls
Enough said – the person who only takes to twitter to abuse other local people
10. Multi-town Spammers
We mention other towns when working out of town – but there is nothing worse than seeing “Business Service – Call XXXXXXXXXXX Now #altrincham #saletown #knutsford #northwich #stockport #manchester #urmston (and we mean the tweets that include multiple hashtags)
And seeing that same post posted every day for a month
HOW TO BLOCK A TWITTER ACCOUNT
- Click on the offending profile
- Click on the cog / gear tab next to where it says follow
- Select Block Or Report
- Click Block
We hope you find this post useful – we hope it makes searching for your local town news easier
We hope it encourages more businesses and residents to use the local town search and decreases spambots
If you do please share with others and help your local community twitter search
If you’d love more Social Media advice and tweets about Altrincham – please follow @altrinchamhq
