How to Filter Out Twitter Spammers When Following Trending Hashtags

Diana Urban
Diana Urban

Updated:

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If you've ever joined a hashtag conversation on Twitter during a popular conference, webinar, TV show, sporting event, etc., you've probably noticed that when the hashtag starts trending, the stream is infiltrated by spammers.

This happened a couple days ago when HubSpot hosted the World's Largest Webinar: Social Media Secrets (#WLW14).

twitter-spammers

WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN?

It's obnoxious having to scroll through these spam tweets when the high-value tweets are hard enough to follow since the tweets flash by so quickly. Fortunately, it's easy to filter out the spam. Here's how.

How to Filter Spam on Twitter

Simply do a basic search on Twitter for your hashtag, and include negative matches in your search. It would look something like this:

#hashtag -term -spam -blah

The terms you negative match will depend on what the spammers are saying that day. Sometimes you can include another trending hashtag, but trends ebb and flow throughout an hour, so it's better to find terms like click, followers (or variations they use like f0ll0wers), etc. that would be used across multiple spam tweets.

Once you create your search, you can save it for later.

twitter-search-negative-match

How to Filter Spam on Tweetdeck

Once you set up a search column in Tweetdeck, click the options icon and add your negative match terms to the excluding field. Don't comma-separate or use dashes between these terms.

filter-on-tweetdeck

How to Filter Spam in HubSpot

When you create a new stream in HubSpot's Social Inbox, click More options. Add your negative match keywords to the Exclude things with these words field. Hit Enter after entering each term.

filter-in-hubspot-social-inbox

How to Filter Spam in HootSuite

Filtering on HootSuite works the same as it does on Twitter. When you create or edit your hashtag search column, enter your negative match keywords like this:

#hashtag -term -spam -blah

filter-hootsuite

Want to share this post? Here are ready-made tweets:

Click to tweet: How to Filter Out Spammers When Following Trending Hashtags - http://hub.am/ROZIwp by @DianaUrban at @HubSpot #TwitterTip

Click to tweet: Are spammers taking over your trending hashtag? Here are instructions for how to filter out the spammers - http://hub.am/ROZIwp #TwitterTip

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Topics: Hashtags

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