The Truth About Twitter Automation
Recently, I came across one of those Twitter tools that made the whole process of finding friends and following them easy. In essence, the program would find a list of people who follow others easily and followed them for you. The upside was that you could get hundreds of new followers in a flash. The downside was you were getting fake followers, and who would want that?
There are in general three kinds of tweeters these days. The elite only follow each other, and have a very high followers/following ratio. The middle class have a decent number of followers but they are following a lot of folks as well. Then there is a third group who follow a lot of people just to get them to follow back. Some tweeters follow everyone they can, and that is great for networking purposes. But at some point you hit the 2,000 follow limit, and you will have to remove people who you are following. Now, if you belong to that third-group, you can expect people who are following you to remove you as soon as you stop following them. That’s what I like to call losing “fake” followers.
These people are not that interested in what you have to say. They are following you because you are following them. In fact, there is a good chance they stop following you when you are not looking. Fake followers are not necessarily bad, but you should also try to provide value to others to get them to follow you regardless of what you do. It’d be hard at first, but if you adopt a long-term Twitter strategy, you can slowly build up your follower list and find people are genuinely interested in what you have to say.
Twitter can be a huge distraction or a very rewarding experience. It really comes down to how you approach it. If your goal is to be a super connector, you can try to connect with as many people as you can. On the other hand, if you want to get the latest industry opinions and mingle with folks who are interested in the same things that you are, you should do your due diligence and use services such as Mr. Tweet to find proper followers. Either way, I do not recommend signing up for an automated Twitter service to get more friends. It’s just not worth it.
