On their blog last week Twitter announced that they are correcting follower and following counts with the end result being that “follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies.”  It is interesting to see that they are taking lessons from the fate of MySpace and fighting misuse of their system before it becomes too rampant.  What does this mean to you?

• Your follower count may drop as the Twitter tracks down spam followers who may have followed you.
• You should get fewer random follow requests (particularly from the ubiquitous “hotties” looking to hook up.)
• You should make sure that your own follow requests are clearly relevant to the content of your account.  Don’t rely on simple factors like geography or age to determine who you will submit a request to.
• Continue to create content that will be useful and of interest to your followers.

Now if we can only get Twitter to stop the Twarfers who use any of the vast number of recent third-party Twitter software products to create such high volumes of Tweet activity that they manage to publish a tweet a minute.  Ugh.  Even I’m not interesting once a minute and we all now how fascinating I am