The math behind Twitter is simple: the more followers, the more powerful you are (well, not that simple, please read on:)). It is quite natural Tweeple are obsessed with the following numbers and are ready to try various (often questionable) tactics to increase that number.
Of course, the only (legit) way to make your following grow is to make it worth it: post great updates people would love to follow. Naturally, this takes time and effort and not everyone has the patience to do it the right way.
Hence the popularity of other (“spammy”) methods to make your following number grow, and here I am listing the 3 of them.
Don’t get me wrong I am not going to tell you why it is unethical or bad to use them: who am I to educate you? (Besides, I have played with all of them just for the sake of an experiment, so I am kind of guilty myself.)
This post is why those tactics are ineffective and even dangerous, but it’s for you to decide is you want to use them or not.
1. Automatic Following Communities:
They work the following way:
- You give it your Twitter login info and allow it to access your account;
- Sometimes you need to specify your interests (but this seldom helps any targeting);
- After that you just start getting hundreds of mutual friends day by day.
Why is this ineffective?
The communities just make no point to me. All you are getting is a number, none of those so-called “followers” ever actually follow you: and you end up being heard by no one having thousands of followers. What’s the point?
2. Twitter Auto-Adding Scripts
This works the following way:
- You install a Greasemonkey script;
- You navigate to any Twitter user’s list of friends;
- You activate the script and it followers all the user’s friends;
- Many of those Tweeple will follow you back.
Why is this ineffective?
Except for often being irrelevant, this is good way to get your account suspended for exceeding the following limit.
3. Advertise Your Twitter Profile
This works as follows:
- You pay for your profile to be shown on some Twitter-related sites;
- A banner is shown to people and they click through and follow if they feel like.
Why is this ineffective?
It just doesn’t work! No one ever clicks and even if someone does, no one follows. Look at the diagram I got for buying 1000 impressions there (the green line represents those who clicked):
The conclusion?
It’s all comes to where we have started: Twitter math is NOT simple and it’s NOT about the numbers. Actually, it is NOT about math. The main thing is if you are really followed or not. 100 “real” dedicated followers who added you for merit are worth thousands!
Post image by Abulic Monkey
