★ How to Achieve 16K Followers OVERNIGHT!

Twitter is only 3 years old but in Internet years, it’s been around the block a few times. A lot of people join, follow the “suggested users” and then they might invite a few friends via Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. After that, it’s that time to send out the first tweet and it usually contains something like, “Um… I’ve joined Twitter and I’m going to try this out. Anyone out there?” I love reading the first tweet from users because it’s entertaining and they’re always similar.

Let’s fast forward a month and now that user has 50 followers which consists mostly of their friends and family or some old schoolmates and maybe a co-worker. They might have a few followers that are accounts operated by companies or spammers but most users that aren’t joining Twitter as a celebrity will probably have 50-200 users after the first month and they are following some people that have thousands of followers so what gives? Well, the next step is asking Twitter, “How do I get more followers?” Someone replies back saying to go to a website to get thousands of followers and of course the new user clicks because they’re very interested.

This reply could be considered spam but they did ask for more followers so I guess it’s relevant, but I’m not going to dive into what’s ethical regarding spam. So this website promises 16 thousand followers and the first week FREE if they sign up and pay $35 a month. So the user signs up and instantly receives 50 new followers and that count continues. (What does that mean, “count continues”?) Pretty soon, they have 16 thousand people following their tweets and the “following” section looks like this.

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Additionally, this is what their following / followers section looks like this.
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As you can see, this person has nearly the same amount of followers / following and they’ve only updated a few hundred times.

I’ve done research and realized that none of these individuals are celebrities and 200 updates is nothing compared to some of the people I follow. Strike 3 is the fact that this user has a near equal amount of followers and following. At this point, it’s clear that they’re using one of these services.

What’s wrong with these services that allow you to get thousands of followers? It’s simple actually and it’s not an issue for some people. Not all of these pay-to-play Twitter hacking tools explain how you’re going to get thousands of followers but it only takes a few days to realize you have just followed hundreds of new people. I received an email from a friend last night who signed up for one of these services:

“I wanted to see if you knew of anyway I can purge all my users and then add people I actually know/want to follow. I had signed up for something that auto-added.”

I linked him to a few sites like this one.

“Way too much garbage. As a Twitter novice, I made the mistake of signing up for one of those get more follower services. The ratio of simple garbage went WAY UP. I am going to close my account and then re-invite people I actually want to see. The whole idea of mutually following people or following people that just post garbage is silly.”

Our conversation got me thinking. I hadn’t put too much thought into how these services work because they all looked like scams but then I did a Google search for “gain Twitter followers” and saw this.

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It looks like these services are doing so well that they are able to afford Google ads to sell their product. But as far as organic Google page-rank, they don’t have any because blogs aren’t linking to them.

What a great tactic though. A new user is trying to get more followers and searches Google and is greeted with dozens of ads on getting more followers. Many of the services are free and a quick submission of your Twitter credentials and you’re in!

This ruins Twitter as my friend realized. Twitter is as much about listening and absorbing than it is about telling the world what you’re doing. The economy and beauty of Twitter is that it’s a two-way country highway with friends passing in the opposite direction. You both share some ideas, links, thoughts and mind-share and then move on as opposed to most social networks that resemble an 8-lane highway with exits, detours, road construction and accidents. I love Twitter’s simplicity but it’s only valuable if you’re receiving updates from people you are interested in.

Twitter is all about being organic and these services take the fun out of Twitter. It’s like having 1,200 channels on your television but the TV is always scanning and never sitting on one channel for more than 5 seconds. Sounds pretty painful, right? That’s exactly what it’s like when you realize that you’re following 16 thousand people that you don’t care about and the stream of “friends” is useless.

There is an alternative where you can use this service and still follow only your friends. There are web and desktop based applications that allow you to configure groups for Twitter. TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop come to mind. I have been against groups since the beginning and neither Twitter.com or its API support groups but people seem to really love them. I’ve asked why and it appears the answer is they follow too many people and just want to read the posts from people they really care about, like family, co-workers or celebrities, in one timeline. My opinion: you’re following too many people.

Let’s say you want to be able to read your Twitter stream and still have thousands of followers using one of these services. The answer is setting up one of these applications with groups for people you actually care about and just looking at the group all day. Now you can have your cake and eat it too but there is still a fundamental flaw that many users haven’t realized.

How do you know those 16 thousand people that follow you actually care what you have to say or if they’re putting YOU in a group of people that they don’t want to read? The final problem might be that they joined Twitter, signed up to a service to get more followers and after their Twitter stream turned into an 8-lane highway, they just quit and moved on. Your 16 thousand followers looks a hell of a lot less now that we realize half of them aren’t reading your tweets, 30% of them have stopped using Twitter and the 20% that are looking at your stream are probably also following 16 thousand people and the likelihood of reading your tweet is so low that you might as well be screaming the password to your gmail account to a herd of elephants. Elephants might be known for “never forgetting” but how many times have you seen an elephant use a computer? Exactly.

At the end of the day, your brilliant idea of getting thousands of followers looks a lot different, doesn’t it? You have a Twitter stream of people you’re following that is barely usable due to the amount of tweets and lack of interesting posts. You are tweeting links to thousands of people that aren’t around, are following too many people who just don’t care about your thoughts and now you have an account that will probably be suspended by Twitter for following too many people too quickly. Oh, and let’s not forget that you probably paid for this service at around $40 a month. Congrats, you’re a Twitter expert and it’s useless.

What have we learned? The organic tips for gaining followers like this one are the tried and true methods for truly making your mark on Twitter. If anyone is asking you to pay money to get ahead on the Internet, just remember it’s all ones and zeros and true social networking happens face to face. If you can get your followers to meet you offline and build lasting friendships, you’re on your way to mastering social media because when Twitter, Facebook and MySpace fade away, there will be other services that pop up and the cycle starts all over but the friendships you made offline will last forever.

Comments 13
  1. Paying to gain “friends/followers” just sounds wrong to me. It took me a year of dedicated tweeting to get me over 2000 followers and I don’t think I’m doing bad. Granted I tweet some pretty crazy stuff sometimes but OH WELL, thats just me!

  2. Thanks for the tip on TweetDeck Groups. Can you explain more about the boiler rooms that create the content that these lazy people are sending out? Sometimes the content isn’t bad but it doesn’t take long to know when a human being isn’t the one who just followed.

    I recommend that one have at least 2 corporate accounts on Twitter: one for your company to gather end-user customers (you will have to follow many but not if they aren’t “real”) and the other account, more personalized, for you to follow and meet targeted strategic prospects. Follow around 200 on the latter account.

    And then care about what people say. Retweet them to show you are actually reading and finding them interesting. I don’t follow people if I don’t see that they’ve retweeted anyone in the past 30 posts. It means, mostly, that they aren’t reading others.

    Regardless of whether the particular person who said they just caught the flu is a business target…say you wish them a recovery. You really don’t want to miss a tweet related to poor health or tragedy that deserves your support or condolences – not from friends, family or those whom you wish to partner with in business.

    Having said that…is there a search function for only those whom you are following?

    It is impossible to always keep up with a stream of 200 people.

  3. Let the crowds of fools waste their money and time. The individual user can work alone on a personal news stream and if it’s interesting an audience will build slowly and organically. It takes patience.

  4. Great observation. I think this is caused by Twitters high signal to noise ratio. The more accounts you follow the noisier your tweet stream becomes which makes finding useful information pretty difficult. One feature of Friendfeed that I really enjoy is the “value” or “weight” that can be associated with a post by adding comments or simply clicking “Like”. This appears to help Friendfeed users bring the valuable and original information out of the sea of noise and to the surface. Not to mention replaces the meme/replication effect that occurs on twitter thanks to ReTweets. That being said I don’t follow anywhere near as many users on Friendfeed as I do on Twitter due to the smaller number of users on the platform. However I do believe that as more Twitter users discover Friendfeed, the built-in features and tools can be used as sort of a volume knob on the information deluge regardless of the number of users your following.

  5. Oh. my goodness. I just wrote the longest comment on here but it wouldn't fit. I'm going to post it up to my blog… it seems pertinent anyway to post there, so why not.

    I hate putting my link on other people's sites… but I hafta for this one. Here's the post I put in as a reply: http://is.gd/wVFi

    Thanks for the great post and insight

  6. Excellent points. People seem to see a high follower number as some sort of end goal, but what does it really get you? I'm in Web design, if I magically added 15,000 more followers who were interested in field hockey, eel recipes and programming in C++, they wouldn't care about my Tweets and vice versa. In the end we have to figure out what we want to achieve from Twitter. Whether we're Tweeting socially, for business or some combination thereof, we'll want to target our audience to find fellow Tweeters who will help us meet out end goals.

    I use Twitter to share and learn best practices related to Web development and marketing, as well as dinner recipes (that don't involve eel). I use Tweetdeck to sort people into relevant groups, but even that wouldn't make it worth following everyone who follows me. I get frequent follower requests from people who are obviously using one or another of the following services. They're either some sort of social media expert (who isn't these days?) or they are focused on some niche such as hunting Puffins in Iceland that is totally irrelevant to my world. While adding them can increase my numbers, since many will unfollow if I don't follow back, the numbers don't matter a whit if they aren't real readers.

    I think the services succeed due to a common misperception about marketing. People think it's a numbers game, but that is only one part of the equation. In the end relevancy plays a far bigger role. For the same reason that media buyers at ad agencies target campaigns to certain demographics and audiences, so should we as Tweeters or marketers, focus on those most likely to have an interest in what we have to say.

  7. What happened to the social experience? If you have 10,000 followers, and I have 200, does that make such a big difference? In my opinion, it's about who I follow that counts. I can still participate in the conversation. Take more time reading the replies I get, and get to know my followers better. And just enjoy twitter in a more friendly way.

    It's sad but true. The more followers you have, the more you are respected on Twitter. And likely to get a new follower. For what I care, they should just remove the follower counter from the public, and make it private.

  8. Social media is exactly that being social…so paying to acquire “followers” is not social media. It is bribed media. Right? Put this in the context of “offline” reality: I am new to a town. I don’t have many friends. Someone at a mall kiosk promises he will make me popular in two weeks. I pay him. Now two weeks later he hands me a list of contact info for 14,000 people who are okay with me contacting them and says “congratulations you are popular.” rnThat is dumb.

  9. Social media is exactly that being social…so paying to acquire “followers” is not social media. It is bribed media. Right? Put this in the context of “offline” reality: I am new to a town. I don’t have many friends. Someone at a mall kiosk promises he will make me popular in two weeks. I pay him. Now two weeks later he hands me a list of contact info for 14,000 people who are okay with me contacting them and says “congratulations you are popular.” rnThat is dumb.

  10. Social media is exactly that being social…so paying to acquire “followers” is not social media. It is bribed media. Right? Put this in the context of “offline” reality: I am new to a town. I don’t have many friends. Someone at a mall kiosk promises he will make me popular in two weeks. I pay him. Now two weeks later he hands me a list of contact info for 14,000 people who are okay with me contacting them and says “congratulations you are popular.” rnThat is dumb.

  11. Social media is exactly that being social…so paying to acquire “followers” is not social media. It is bribed media. Right? Put this in the context of “offline” reality: I am new to a town. I don’t have many friends. Someone at a mall kiosk promises he will make me popular in two weeks. I pay him. Now two weeks later he hands me a list of contact info for 14,000 people who are okay with me contacting them and says “congratulations you are popular.” rnThat is dumb.

  12. Social media is exactly that being social…so paying to acquire “followers” is not social media. It is bribed media. Right? Put this in the context of “offline” reality: I am new to a town. I don't have many friends. Someone at a mall kiosk promises he will make me popular in two weeks. I pay him. Now two weeks later he hands me a list of contact info for 14,000 people who are okay with me contacting them and says “congratulations you are popular.”
    That is dumb.

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