Power twitterers have learned that the best way to grow your list is to follow everyone you can. The unwritten rule is to at least follow everyone who follows you. If you don’t, the person who follows you may un-follow you if you don’t return the favor.

The problem here is that as your list grows, you end up with a bunch of garbage and you need a solution to manage all these tweets. Keep the ones you really want to read and hide the tweets from people you never really cared about. But to do that, you need a third-party tool. The most popular of which is probably TweetDeck.

Twitter.com has now introduced a new feature that helps you manage your followers. The important thing to notice is that when you are viewing the list of people who follow you, it shows you their most recent tweets. If it looks like spam, you may want to block or un-follow them.

If a twitterer is always sending out spam, it is probably a “bot”, or an automated program, so they are not really friends. They are just bombing you with ads and ignoring anything you send back. I personally don’t mind a few tweets with ads in them if the twitterer is a human and responds to my tweets on occasion. This new feature makes it easier to spot the bots and block the bots.

Twitter is spam-proof by design, but in practice it is not. You have total control over what messages you receive. Thank you Twitter.com for making it even easier to clean up our lists.

To see this new feature, view the list of your followers or those you follow. You will see their latest tweets and there is a button on the right that makes it easy to deal with them quickly.

Special Note: There is an outstanding third party website that helps you find people to follow and manage your twitter.com account in many ways. You can see lists of who follows who and who doesn’t and much more. Check out www.refollow.com . It truly is amazing for managing your twitter.com lists.