How can I control who follows me on Twitter?

Question

I tend to get a bunch of emails every week that say:

JaneDoe (JaneDoe343) is now following your tweets on Twitter.is now following you.

A little information about JaneDoe:

0 followers
1 tweet
following 483 people

I prefer my followers to be real people, so is there any way I can control who follows me?

Answer 1

There are some options:

1. You might want to make your account protected. If you do this, you can control who gets to follow you and who doesn't. However this also means that none of your tweets will be public, so people will have to follow you first (and you will have to accept them) before they can see your tweets.
2. You can block a person you don't like. Just go to their profile and click the block link in the sidebar.

Answer 2

You could block them, as described here. If the account is definitely a spammer, I guess Report JaneDoe as spam would work too.

Answer 3

Unless you want to make all your updates private, so that every follower will need your approval (Settings -> Protect my tweets), all you can do is manually block / report as spam them each time.

Answer 4

You can protect your tweets if the side effects are acceptable to you. This way you will receive an email anytime someone wants to follow you.

On the account screen for the settings page, check the box that says "Protect my Tweets", just be aware of the caveats which are as follows (text from the settings page when you are actively protecting your tweets):

Your tweets are currently protected; only those you approve will receive your tweets. Your future tweets will not be available publicly. Tweets posted previously may still be publicly visible in some places.

I did this recently, it's been much nicer I think.