I was recently followed by an affiliate marketer from Australia claiming that she could “guarantee 25,000 followers in 90 days.” There are 2 things wrong with this statement.
First, why do you want 25,000 followers? Seriously, do you think they all really care what you have to say?  There is so much twitter spam out there and the real guarantee here is that your followers will be lousy. Here’s a good summary from WebWorkerDaily.com describing the result of too many followers well.
How Auto-Gathered Followers Hurt You
There are services available that claim to increase your follower account automatically. These are a bad idea, however, because auto-gathering followers creates:
- Chaos and noise on your Twitter stream if part of the automated follower-building process you’ve adopted entails “auto-following back.†That reduces the value of your Twitter stream as a listening tool and information source.
- Followers who aren’t listening to what you have to say. That diminishes the value of marketing anything on Twitter and reduces the chance of being heard at all.
- Overinflated follower numbers, which are a turn-off for those looking to make meaningful connections. Many people use the “follow-to-follower ratio†as part of assessing someone’s “worth†on Twitter, as opposed to sheer number of followers. For example, if someone is following 48,895 people and has 46,975 followers, that looks suspiciously like they are fishing for followers rather than genuinely interested in interaction.
- Automated activity in your Twitter account that you don’t control.
- The possibility that your Twitter password gets into the hands of an untrusted third party.
And secondly, This person was guaranteeing 25,000 followers but only had 11,000 themselves! If you’re gonna say you can do something for me, you netter be able to do it for yourself first.
My advice is to pick your followers carefully. Don’t auto follow everyone. Then check out their twitter page first to see if you’re even interested in reading what they have to say.
A few rules I have for who I won’t follow.
- Are their tweets boring?
- Are all their tweets inside jokes?
- Are all their tweets trying to get me to buy something form them that I know is gonna be too good to be true?
- Do they cuss?
- Is your profile picture a picture of you barely in a bikini?
Basically, if they offer something I’m interested in and will benefit from, I’ll follow them. Likewise, I try to have my tweets offer some good information that I hope someone will benefit from. If you aren’t interested in what I have to say, I hope you don’t follow me either.
Currently, I’m following 149 people and that’s almost too many. Fortunately, there’s only about 10 of them who post regularly that I’m interested in. Otherwise, it’d be too much to follow.
So, If you like what I have to say, follow me at twitter.com/mpeesel, don’t worry, I don’t tweet too often.
PS. While researching this article, I found a great article in a blog that I’d never seen before talking about how bad thousands of followers were and the bad tactics affiliate marketers…. It sounded great until I checked his twitter account and found it was FULL of affiliate marketing links for making quick money, losing quick weight and more.
I now have a number 6 on my list: People who send inconsistent messages and don’t practice what they preach.
