Twitter is not only a famous social networking and marketing tool but it is also a symbol of growth by considering the number of followers. It means, higher the follower number, more dynamic growth is. You will see many bloggers who compare their previous month/years’ follower count to current number of followers to gage the growth.
But question is, can we manipulate this number? Can we increase our followers count by using illegitimate methods? Answer is yes. It’s very simple and easy to inflate this number.
Today I was checking my Alexa ranking (one of my time wasting activities), suddenly an idea came to my mind, why not to check the Alexa ranking of one of my previous blog. I did so and started observing various information provided by Alexa. I saw a good number of backlinks and curiosity forced me to check who are linking back to me.
Instantly a site caught my attention due to uniqueness of its name and I clicked it to view its content. I have a habit to check the initial posts of the blog to observe the growth of blogging career of every blog(another habit to waste a lot of time ). This gives me inspiration to work hard and put my best efforts.
I saw a detailed post about Jeremy Schoemaker’s spell mistake in his business slogan. His slogan is “Skills to Pay the Bill” but mistakenly it was written as “Skills to Play the Bills.” I clicked the screenshot that guy attached with his post and was surprised to see that he was right.
Yet this story not ended here, when I observed difference in followers count I appreciated his growth but amazingly next number put me in the world of surprise. In 2009 (as blogger claimed his post in 2009) Jeremy was following 12000 plus and currently he is following just 90 people. See Here.
It’s Amazing. Why a person will unfollow such huge number? Had he followed wrong people? (Don’t get offence my friends, here I mean to say change in interest or any other factor that led him to take unfollow decision). Why he followed this large number of twitter accounts that he thinks they deserve unfollow later?
I started to brainstorm on the reason and got the possible answer. Actually Jermey Schoemaker wants to inflate his number of followers by following a huge number of tweeps. In return, we know that, they also followed Mr. Jeremy. In this way he increased his followers’ count in very short time.
What was the fun of doing so? We know you immediately came into notice that you have a good number of followers, people tend to follow them. Because higher your follower figure, higher you will be ranked in twitter list and sites quote such twitter accounts as an example. Take an example of this Google search query Top 10 Twitter accounts, you will notice Top 100, Top 200 and other famous celebrities who have great count of followers like Britney Spears is also shown in this search result of 1st page of SERP.
But when you follow people in bulk, you will miss various things like common interest, quality twitter profiles etc even you would be following spammers as well.
When Jermey got a good number of followers, he realized that it’s time to unfollow that huge list.
My aim is not to blame anyone but I want to ask a question. Is such practice ethical? Shall we inflate our tweeter followers by manipulating the system? I don’t think so. I am sure I can increase my follower number to 20+ just in two months. If we do a little math, like;
Follow 400 tweeps daily and at the end of 2nd month you will have,
400 x 60=24000.
But again is this practice fair or Jeremy is exercising modified saying “All is Fair in Love, War and Business”. Decide yourself.
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{ 47 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s an interesting question. I usually follow anyone who follows me as long as they are a real person. I haven’t actively tried to follow people just to get them to follow me back. Even worse, unfollow them later. I think that would be a little unethical.
I don’t see why it couldn’t work though. Twitter is very simple like that, all it takes is a click.
I follow a similar routine on Twitter. I generally followback who follows me, provided that he provides something useful via his tweets or has a good followed/follower ratior (a gratitude)
More precisely, this is one of great strategy to increase your twitter follower-ship plus maintaining a good relationship with them. What would be fun of following and being followed by huge number without knowing them. Its true we can’t remember each & every one but at least we know , we added them after seeing some interest. You are a great and intelligent blogger.
Thanks for sharing your views. I really appreciate it.
Isn’t this what spammers do? I do think it is unethical and a bit greedy because ultimately it isn’t about relationships for him it’s more about conversion rates. Converting followers into potential customers which that is basically what he promotes. Like Wayne said social media in general is like that. You can either garner a ton of followers or reciprocate. It just depends on what type of person you are. Just like with celebrities they want huge followers, but they don’t follow back. I don’t believe it is right to disregard the people that you profit off of when it is in your power to directly interact with them.
You have used correct term “Spammers” for such type of people. They just want to benefit themselves by all means. Twitter is not about increasing followers and reducing followings. Its matter of interest, relationship. Follow and be followed by few but have a good relationship with them. As far as celebrities are concerned, they just follow celebrities.
Hi Imran,
I’ve never really gone after a following. I just follow the people that follow me. However, as the list grows I’m more focused with quality. So for the first time I am pairing down my list. I’m getting rid of all the car dealerships and mental health providers and focusing on those who are involved with Internet Marketing in some shape, way or form. Right now I’m following about 100 more than follow me. And those 100 are mostly famous people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Well Morgan, you have opted a good strategy. Actually in very start of my blogging career, i followed every one who followed me. I lost quality. But now first I see the profile and if he/she has blog/site i pay a visit to it and then add it to my network. I have added friends form blogosphere to my list and TweetDeck helps me to separate the tweets from that list. Now I have quality but I am not un-following my followers cuz they have followed me. No. Probloggers, celebrity bloggers should not do such type of activities because, they are famous just because of us. I was having lot of respect for shoemoney, but his act of taking benefit from follow back trend disappointed me.
Now shoemoney following only 40.I don’t know why.
Very simple, his intension was to get huge followers list.
I’m not sure that it’s necessarily unethical, but I think it’s poor form. It’s the oldest abused trick for Twitter. John Chow did something similar to Shoe Money only on a larger scale. John Chow created Twitter do follow tool/list and used it to inflate his follower count, then he unfollowed pretty much everyone as well.
I have a few Twitter accounts for different websites. For those, I’ll use Tools like Blast follow to find more followers who write about similar topics, but I don’t mass unfollow them afterward.
For the website specific Twitter accounts that I use, I’ll follow back pretty much anyone with the exception of bots, obvious spammers, and people who Tweet about “Forex” since they’re typically spammers.
For my personal twitter account, I don’t really care about Follower count and I usually won’t follow back anyone unless I know them from somewhere.
Well Jaret every one has its own view and definition of unethical, but in general if someone follow in bulk with intension of unfollow later, it is unethical. Amazingly these pro bloggers don’t describe such methods in their posts or blogging tips, cuz these are unethical or at least negatively viewed by community.
Hey Imran, hope your well!
I too being a full time Internet Marketer track my twitter accounts (daily actually) in order to keep seeing increasing growth. For me like others I earn a decent amount from Twitter alone so it’s important to me to have a large number of followers and yes, potential clients. However when it comes time to unfollow I find there are enough people who haven’t tweeted in the last 30, 60 days so those are the one’s I personally unfollow. The rest (yourself included) I keep, not just as a potential source of income, but as a valuable source of ideas and knowledge! Because while I’m spending my days learning, growing my websites, and blogs your each out there doing the same thing! I have access to so much information with these other internet marketers, and blog owners that I would personally feel it was a loss to unfollow them. (A loss to me)
Thanks for sharing your ideas, thoughts, and knowledge! Appreciated!
Thanks Warren for sharing your point of view. Warren, most of us review our twitter accounts and observe various stats like who has frequently re-twitted our stuff, who replied to to our tweets etc. In my opinion, most of us do the same as you do i.e removal of deadbeats. This is normal in our world. All these practices are ethical and we have solid reason for unfollow. Amazing point for me is, these probloggers never ever write about their out of way, unethical practices rather you will find articles with great titles like “10 Ways to increase Twitter Followers” or “How I increased my Twitter Follower by 3k” etc. It means, not all probloggers, they are just increasing the page views of their blog/site by writing such fake/non real information. They are providing such information that is even not used/followed by themselves even. Most of time when I was reading their articles, I wonder how simple is to do that work. But every time, practical and real situation proved to be different as claimed by them in their articles. What I want from them is, plz don’t provide such information that is not true or not tried by themselves.
True, personally I’m like you, I want ALL the information on how you achieved something whether it be huge followers, traffic, income, etc… even if it’s grey or blackhat and then at least I can make the decision on whether or not it’s something I’m comfortable with doing.
I know that if I were to be “unethical” shall we say, I could make a lot more money. But at what price?
I like to push limits, and have even had my twitter account suspended for following too aggressively but now that is information that i can share with my readers so that they can make the choice to try something similar, or to say “Ok I can follow 800 people a day for about a month before Twitter gets cranky and shuts me down!!” LOL
This is the point Warren. Following 800+ is really no problem but what about quality, relationship, same interest. We are the people who care about it. We use twitter or any other social networking in true sense. We build relationship, increase our social networking circle. In start i followed every one who followed me but later I felt I am doing wrong. I made a list and include all friends who are known to me. Now I don’t follow blindly. Because aim is to increase my social networking. This is totally wrong thinking that “Oh, I am celebrity, I shouldn’t follow common every one”. Just imagine that only 40-50 persons are known to that problogger. Bloggers like us will never ever take benefit at the cost of others.
Its’ really nice to have a conversation with you on this issue.
even john chow done this , follow people they will follow you back and then unfollow who don’t follow you . In this manner you will get a good amount of followers . But if you follow and unfollow same people many times twitter will band you
And i don’t think a person can follow 400 people and unfollow the people who don’t follow them back . For this you have to use bot .
Aatif, they are the giants of their respective fields. Tailor made software and bots are not issue for them.Shoemoney is running hi sown set of web server. imagine this. Worlds’ most chronic and problematic task is to run web server.
Aatif, I don’t really think John Chow does that. He follows 101 people and has over 55k followers. At one point, he followed about 3-5k people, but they’ve all been unfollowed.
You can easily follow 400 people with a free twitter tool called Blastfollow. There are plenty of other tools to unfollow people who don’t follow you back such as Just Unfollow or others. I’ve used these on various Twitter accounts without getting banned or having other problems.
Funny how i came across this page. I wouldn’t think that shoemoney would inflate his twitter account being an authority in making money online. I guess he just wanted to speed up the process.
So it means following in bulk and later on un-following all of them is not unethical and is necessary for every celebrity/business to speed up the some process?
Hey Bro, sorry to hear about your car. Hope it works out for you!
Imran,
It is pretty annoying for sure. I have multiple accounts for different blogs. Often, I get someone who follows three of these accounts. I typically follow back anyone provided they don’t appear to be a blatant spammer and their Tweets are in English. Not much point in me following Tweets in Chinese since I can’t read them…
Then I notice that they unfollow all 3 of my accounts after I just followed them back. Very annoying!
Bottom line, there’s an easy solution with Twitter tools such as Just Unfollow or Tweepi.
Jarret, this is problem we do face. It’s pretty annoying that people want to show they are very famous and have lot of visitors. Funny part of story is, when they tweet something, they get very nominal RT which shows they are not genuine twitter users.
So try to maintain a standard and only follow those who seems to be natural.
One of the things I’ve noticed with having the number of followers that I do, is that I get too many retweets. I know this sounds like a problem some others would like, but I often feel bad, because it isn’t always feasible for me to return the favour for each of them, as often as they do it for me. I guess at times a simple thanks for the rt, is the best I can offer.
Warren here are some points we need to understand.
1) You get RT which means you have some level of relationship with them. May be at the time of following, you send them some Welcome tweet, etc. Otherwise a person who is unknown to me will hardly get RT from me. So being natural is important, as you are in your case.
2) Words like Thanks, thanks for RT Love and I really appreciate conveys a message that they are in our notice. We are observing them and paying attention to them. it’s also a way to create relationship with them.
So it’s clear that, being natural or at least being ethical will lead you to good relationship and follower-ship.
Thanks for your participation Warren.
Imran, while I personally do not use tricks, I have tested them in order to gauge effectiveness. I have a blog that I use for such experiments.
If you are interested, type this into Google (without quotes):
“Twitter reciprocal Following is stupid”
The way I see it, relationship building is the point of networking. Following, unfollowing, auto-following without a blueprint is like kicking sand on the beach. When the grains settle, it would be as if you’d never kicked at all.
Cheers,
Mitch
Allen, in my whole article and comments, I emphasized on networking and building relationships. Like one of our commentator said, building an impressive number of followship without going in networking is not a big deal. Following in bulk is not unethical, but later on unfollowing them just to shine the profile is totally unethical. It’s better to build relationship rather kicking sand on beach.
Allen, I really appreciate your participation in our community.
Good questions to ask us. As a newbie to blogging and social media I have deliberately not just followed heaps of people. If someone follows me and I follow them back and they are spamming I unfollow. Also, when I see someone has thousands of followers I don’t usually follow them. How can I build up a relationship with someone like that? I want to interact with people, not just do the numbers game. I like that as I am getting to know more people in the blogging community they choose to follow me and I am now following them too.
Patricia Perth Australia
Patricia, we bloggers tend to act naturally. Following and unfollowing people is routine, but performing unfollow in heap or bulk is un-natural. You are doing good, react naturally and watch increasing your followership.
Imran, this is probably the most comments that I’ve ever left on a single blog post, lol. Earlier today, I retweeted a blog post about Commentluv at the Growmap blog. I do know Gail and was retweeting her post since she’s pretty cool.
Growmap uses Twitthis which is a Twitter plugin that I’ve never heard of. When I clicked to tweet her post, there was some type of opt-in for a contest that I didn’t pay much attention to.
I was doing some maintenance on my Twitter account a few hours later. To my surprise, guess who I was following? Shoemoney lol! It took me a few seconds to realize that it must have had something to do with Gail’s site.
Well, I thought you might find this interesting.
Jarret, plugin make easy our lives but still we have to properly configure the plugin to work with our blogs. Like this twitthis plugin requires consumer key, consumer secret etc. Better to check the contents of tweet before hitting tweet button.
Hi Imran,
I am so glad I was reading this. When we installed TwitThis that contest promo thing wasn’t in there. I did not know about it until just now (because I don’t use it to share posts – I use su.pr or feed reviews from StumbleUpon or use Share on FriendFeed).
I’ll have to think about this. I might want to change that out. The contest thing is from them – not from me.
I do know you are fair. Most of times what happen that Plugin/theme author leaves a backlink to their site or link to some contest. Even some leave room for their feeds, you might have observed that you receive their news feed within your plugin option page. So it’s not about you, it’s about Plugin and its author.
Hey Gail,
I’m sorry I would have told you, but I assumed that you already knew about it.
Nice observation Imran and I believe Shoemoney unfollowed people to cut down the spam from his timeline..
Initially I used to do the same.. I started following all the people who followed me and that ways my follower count reached till 6.5K but later on my timeline become unreadable coz of spam and by the end I unfollowed all spam profile and from following 5K people I cut down to 900 and I guess it’s a right decision as now I can see only interesting and imp tweets…
Hmmm, Harsh that might be reason of unfollow but question is out of that 15k+ accounts only 45 accounts are non-spam/friends according to shoemoney. You cut down the list to 900 from 6.5k which seems reasonable. But in shoemoney case, he squeezed that list to only 45account which seems un-natural.
Unfollowing people to change what is in your timeline is unnecessary. All you have to do is use Twitter lists to hone in on specific Tweets. I organize mine by subject so I can quickly find what I want and easily see what to RT and with whom to interact.
I need to take a lesson from Gail, and start clearing out my clutter!
Lists you say?
Thanks for the tip!
Gail, twitter lists are of great use and facilitates us by providing a separate timeline. I am also doing so, created my own list and i RT and listen to them. After following huge number, it really becomes difficult to read them on timeline. Here lists come to our help.
And they say this so called gurus don’t play dirty. Humph! The only time I did a mass unfollow was when I started getting spammed by those I was following and then I noticed that they were robots
.
They do claim so “Not to play Dirty” but situation is altogether different.
great info….currently I have a very few followers on twitter… but surely these tips to help me a lot.Thanks for sharing this……
I don’t think websites like shoemoney, got to be big without getting a little dirty.
Hunter I agree with your statement. Shoemoney like business can’t build such business empire without getting dirty. They need to do it to increase their fame, marketing etc.
..Those who have been on Twitter recently might have definitely observed the increasing number of spam that has started on twitter and their number is continuously increasing in massive manner. The problem will persist till Twitter finds out some way to remove them out..A few methods to recognize Twitter Spam .As the acceptance and implementation of Twitter is growing rapidly there is an increased growth in number of spam and occurrence of excessive noise in this kind of social network web site. So be attentive and careful to the subsequent alerts particularly when numbers cross thousand marks.
Nice! But to get 1000 followers, you need to spend a long time. I recommend another way can boost your followers on Twitter quickly is using Twiends – a great handy gadget for Twitter.
its a very unethical in my point view, i mean that is such a cheap thing to do. though i was once victim of spamming and i had unfollow quite a few people who were very weird.
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