Buying Twitter followers?
I've been carrying out a small experiment in one of the areas of greatest potential abuse of social media: Twitter marketing. If you Google "Twitter buy followers," you'll see lots of choices. One outfit called Quick Online Tips offers 100,000 followers for a mere $3,479.
I didn't want to spend money, so I went to a far tamer site, FastFollowers.com. It functions as a sort of Lonely Hearts Club for Twitterers. Every time you follow a person, you get a point. You give the points back when people follow you. So, if you have lots of patience (I don't), you follow thousands of people, and eventually thousands follow you. (You can take a shortcut by simply buying credits, 5,000 of them for $99.50.)
I set up a new Twitter account which now has 208 followers. (I'll keep it secluded, for now, in my little laboratory. I want it to remain a purely FastFollower beast.)
Those 208 people "follow" me. They appear to pay no attention to my Tweets. They don't respond when I send them @ messages. They're too busy branding themselves to their followers, including me, to listen. Their only communication is spam in my direct-mailbox. Example:
martinbastin
Wishing you health and happiness....I look forward to Tweeting with you....for FREE marketing information check out my blog at http://bit.ly/4OyKe
It would be easy to write off all the people on FastFollower as spammers. But it doesn't appear to be the case. Some are actually sharing observations and links. But they want a crowd.
Why is this? Could it be that having 10,000 Twitter followers gives people the social media version of a face lift? Does it make them more employable? Open doors? All I know is that people are willing to pay for it, and they're not all spammers.
