When I started my new website ViralConversations.com, I also started a new twitter profile. Since this was a brand new profile I was able to observe changes easily. As you can see from the screenshot below I am following 42 people but have 43 followers. The extra person who is following me as a person I’d like to talk about.
When you create a new profile on twitter, and the account is banned, twitter’s system does not remove it from the following count of others. So if you were to create thousands of fake profiles, and follow people could artificially inflate their follower counts without having to go through the trouble of finding real friends.
So why would you want to profile the thousands of fake friends … to get real friends that’s why…
When people getting a new follower email alert they look several things, here are some of the most popular:
- Do I know the person or company?
- Does this person talked to people I know or like?
- Does this person talk about information or subject matters that I’m interested in?
- How many other people are following this person?
It’s the last one that you’re hoping to take advantage of. News bots on twitter have huge followings, and the ability to drive massive amounts of traffic. If you are creating a news bot and you wanted people to follow or feel was a trustworthy profile, having a profile with thousands of followers would be a good first step.
Twitter and lots of other social media sites simply aren’t prepared for adversarial usage. Spammers were used to dealing with services like Google have very sophisticated techniques, and grow more sophisticated every year. For new social media sites that aren’t prepared for adversarial users, this is a problem. In fact I’ve written about this before (see Spammers Google’s Defensive Line).
Twitter needs to take a more active role in managing and supervising their community. They need to understand that the social space is going to have all the social problems that plague forums, message boards, and social bookmarking sites. Trolls, spammers and malcontent personalities always go where the traffic is. They need to devote time and resources to these problems, if they hope to keep a vibrant and growing community that isn’t overrun if they hope to survive for the long term.
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That seems really nice trick of increasing the followers….
I think I should give it a try….
Oops!
The adversarial users/usage you talk of has other implications as well, for instance I think that they represent a key group of users which harm the health, stability and performance of Twitter.
I’m still surprised that they haven’t taken more stringent action against these types of users, they add no value to the network nor to the social effect that a service like Twitter hopes to establish and foster going forward.
I agree, I think Twitter needs to do many things.This site still has a great deal of potential.
This is good to know. This would also let you make a really big Twitter Wheel. Have you seen it? It serves no purpose but I thought is was pretty cool. I just wrote a post about it.
Also extremely easy to spot resulting in a ban of the account you created all the friends for. The autofollow (with some number limitations) seems to me the best darkish way of getting new followers.
Or just have an argument with you, that always nets me 10-20.
@TheMadHat: well of course you dont follow only the exact same people/person with every account. muddy up the waters with the top 100 people on twitter, most of who run autofollow bots anyway … oops
Use the ‘twitter grease monkey script’. Then do the following:
1. Go find someone that has a lot of followers.
2. Go engage in a conversation with that person.
3. Go follow every single one of the people that are following them.
4. Wait a couple of hours.
5. Unfollow all ‘non-mutual followers’.
Alternate method (for higher quality followers):
1. Go find a leader in your niche.
2. Engage in a conversation with them on Twitter.
3. Follow all the people they are following.
4. Wait a day or two.
5. Unfollow all ‘non-mutual followers’.
The above scenarios will create a massive influx of followers for your account. It will also always keep the number of followers higher than the number of people you are following (because you unfollow non -mutuals and people will follow you after you unfollowed them because they are slow to add you after they see you followed them).
Take care,
@BrentDPayne
That half-assed banning approach makes no sense to me. I have to go in manually, see that someone is clearly a spammer (100-to-1 following-to-follower ratio and 1 post), click through and see that they’re banned. If they’re banned, why don’t they disappear completely?
Unfortunately, Twitter almost seems typical of a Web 1.0 dot-com. They have no business plan, no monetization plan, seem gleefully ambivalent towards spam, etc. They just built a tool, liked it, and let people use it. In some ways that’s nice (I’m glad they’re not just in it for the money), but in other ways it’s a recipe for eventual disaster.
You did a great job in blogging about this! Bookmarked it!
-Briana
And when you have a lot of automated news bots on Twitter, let them follow each other. Thus you can spare yourself the pain of creating loads of fake accounts.
Oops,good idea to Increase the Twitter Followers.You did a great work in this blog.Really i appreciate you.thanks.
he he, I think I will give it a try too… Seems effective but not unless proven… I have 5 twitters accounts but most of them are abandoned..
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