Twitter Tools Make A Bad Following
There are thousands of people that will disagree with me. Their end goal is to have a massive following. You’ve read all sorts of differing opinions on how to go out and find people and get them to follow you on twitter. I’ll assume you want people to follow you because you hope they’re going to read what you write; you want to share information; and you want to interact with your potential customers or current customers.
I’m writing this after less than 24 hours when my follower count jumped 220%; most of that happened in about 4 hours. If you go over to my twitter account you’ll see I don’t have a huge list. But that is still a significant jump if you understand how I managed to get that. I did the unthinkable. I went and added about 10 new people to follow from the IM niche that I was interested in reading tweets from. There was no tactic involved. I wanted more information so why not go find some interesting people to follow. I think I managed to add 10 or so people yesterday morning.
I must have triggered the automation machines because that 220% increase was caused by me adding those 10 people. It’s very easy to identify those that use automation. Simply go look at their account and notice they’re following to follower ratio, it’s probably close to 1:1. I see these people with 2000 followers, and they’re following 2001 people, clear indication their using auto-follow techniques. For those of you that haven’t read how this works it’s simple, let me explain.
Auto-Following Summary
You setup a twitter tool to search twitter for keywords. This could be keywords from people’s tweets, it could be information from my profile, or likely what happened to me was this. I go and follow a very popular name, people then watch that name to see the accounts that follow the popular name. So I’m into Internet Marketing, I go follow someone like Yanik Silver. Now if you were looking to find a bunch of people interested in internet marketing, it would make sense to go find all the people who are interested in Yanik Silver. You see his list of followers and simply follow them, in this case hoping I’m going to follow them back. That’s it, that’s the magic.
People use keywords or other peoples lists to find relevant potential followers and they will follow them. So I have 200+ new followers after 3 hours, all of them likely hoping I follow them back. Likely not interested in what I have to say or share, only interested in my return follow so they can have me as part of their (hopefully) reading audience.
The Bad List
I find it hard to keep up with following 80 people on twitter, and half of those people don’t even update their account, so we’re talking 40. How on God’s green earth is any human being supposed to actually pay attention to the tweets of 2000 (let alone 40,000) people they’re following? They can’t, they don’t, they never have. So if I were to auto-follow all these people, I would now have an additional 200+ followers, yipppeeee you say?
Not quite. I have 200+ followers who have no intention nor capability to even see or read my tweets. So if they’re not reading, what was the point in it all. It’s not genuine, it’s not what I would call organic. If I was following this same rule, I’d have 1000+ people too, and I wouldn’t read anything they want me to read of theirs. I won’t name accounts but there are plenty of people on twitter following 30k-60k people. Those 200+ people who just added me, almost every single one of them is following 1500+ people.
I suppose it’s a nice gesture, but really are we that delicate? It serves nothing more than to inflate your number, meanwhile you have a bunch of people who aren’t reading anything, so what really is there to gain? If you’re following 300 people or less, I could believe you’re interested in most of those people and do actually read a fair amount of those tweets. But those with rising following counts into the thousands…I’m not buying it at all.
What do you think, do you have a 1:1 ratio? Leave a comment
PS. – I’m sure this tactic may have it’s use, but mostly I compare it to creating an entirely inactive email list of people who never read your email messages, doesn’t serve the purpose its intended to.
PPS. – After about 48 hours has gone by, half of those who added me have removed me as they never got the follow back from me, so their automation software unfollowed me.
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Filed Under: Social Media
I tried some of the automation techniques and they worked well, but I tend to agree now, the list of followers I had weren’t really responsive. Maybe it was what I offered, or maybe they never read it. I’m inclined to think they never saw most of what I wrote, as everyone had thousands of people to follow.
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I think the whole concept behind using Twitter tools to gain a large following is to seem influential in your niche however I do agree that also having a large following count does also discredit you somewhat. However I use hummingbird to auto follow on my twitter account and surprisingly what it seems to do is target users that are new to Twitter and auto follow them and they follow me back, I get tweets like @…. thank you for being my first follower all the time and these people only follow like one to ten people even after two months.
So even though some Twitter tools may just follow people for the sake of autofollowing some tools like Hummingbird are actually quite smart in their approach, look at accounts like @barackobama and @britneyspears , these accounts follow hundreds of thousands of users despite them being celebrities therefore I do think there is some good when it comes to autofollowing. If I am really interested in a particular person’s tweets and want to read them I now use the listing feature and put them in a particular list that I can access easily. All in all great article, I’ll be sure to share!
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Kevin Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Valid point, I thought about it afterwords, and I suppose those with a large following want to allow their followers to DM them, this requires the follow back in order for that to happen. I don’t believe that’s what most people were after in the case of my 220% increase.
Thanks for reading!
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I totally agree, its a numbers game when you play with twitter. I did the auto thing myself, got tons of follows but like you say its about a 1:1 ratio. People care about your tweets as much as you care about there’s.
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Kevin Reply:
June 6th, 2011 at 11:42 am
There is still a lot of auto stuff going on that’s for sure. I alway see my follower count shoot up based on some keyword and then disappear once I don’t auto-follow back.
It’s a slow process yes, but it’s a better one.
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