I am hearing this Twitter buzz going on about getting more followers and the ways you can get them.

If you don’t know Twitter, it is sort of like a truncated but still fun social networking site where users submit “statuses” of what’s going on with them in less than 140 characters. Many celebrities are using Twitter as well, the real verified ones. On Twitter, you can follow somebody if you like their updates and wish to keep in touch with that someone’s updates. Unlike with other social networks, if you follow (add) someone on Twitter, it doesn’t mutually have the other add you back so you have “following” and “followers” separate. People become very addicted and crazy about getting more followers to make them look like somewhat popular or to attract ad services.

I’m not here to promote about Twitter in general, so let’s get to the chase (don’t worry, this is not a promotion speech); back to Twitter followers. There are many ways to get Twitter followers; buying through eBay or websites, joining what are called Twitter trains, and task offering services as with Clickthru. I tried all of them to see if they are real and the quality of results for testing purposes. I used both a test account and my main Twitter account where they both have real profile feels since I didn’t want the test account, random profile picture, or any test account feels to interfere with the results.

eBay/websites: There are many providers on there selling X followers in X days. I bought a test package from each seller for my test account (didn’t use my main account here because they require me to send them username and password and can’t change any until the service is done). Such services usually follow people for you using a software, follow and unfollow those who doesn’t follow you back, send messages through your account and some send even spam. I’ve been promised 1000 followers in 7 days or so; with very few vendors I did get about 800 but with most, either way less and took very long time. If you do quality tweets that fall into the keyword the mutual followers are interested in, they’ll keep following you but there is a risk of losing them even with one unrelated tweet. Also choose service providers carefully since they keep your username and password during all those time and their activities can sometimes trigger Twitter’s “watch” and “TOS violators” list.

Offering Tasks: This is similar to a “get paid to” advertising method. You offer a task and pay the users to complete them, in my case to follow me in Twitter, and I used Clickthru.net for such service. Both my main account and test accounts were used for this experiment, along with 4 Clickthru test accounts and offering raffles & pay per follow through it. I received an average of 30 followers in one month time frame per account (a 3 months test). I found out offering tasks to follow you can get you followers but you are at high risk of losing them as soon as you pay them. If you’re lucky yo do have a chance of attracting 1-2 users to keep following you if the two’s interests clicked. (On a side-note, my other problem through Clickthru was offering a $10 raffle to follow; some users did not realize that with raffles they are paid only when the raffle ends and that only one winner will be chosen. They did follow you but also unfollow in few days later with negative feedbacks stating no payments received.)

Twitter Trains: I used Free Twitter Train, Spread My Tweets, TTrain, and PlzFollow (Before it relaunched). General immediate results were that my followers counts did go up from 0 to 1000+. However, since the people joining the so-called Twitter trains mostly do not care about following you (with the exceptions of the few rare ones) but getting followers for themselves, most of them “add all as advised” to get themselves on the train but once they were on, they mostly go back through their following lists and delete the recently followed ones. Above results were from monitoring the same day as paying for a premium VIP service on the trains. General long term results were that since most people joining the trains are teens, fanclub profiles, business owners, and spammers, almost none of them has the same interested as you. I was monitoring unfollowers with the script providing who unfollowed and at the time of posting which tweet. Everytime I posted quotations of my liking, my thoughts, or share books or adult contents (as in teens unrelated, not porn), I lost the teenagers or the fanclubs profiles, which were also setup by teens. Most business owners stay but all they did was post their business links but there are also some who do quality tweets at times too. Spammers ALWAYS stay but they will @reply you all the time once they noticed you exist on Twitter. In the end, I ended up with only 4-5 actual Twitter users with similar interests or tweet types. To sum-up the overall image, in general, using Twitter trains, followers count can peak temporarily to a certain amount, but it’ll drop back daily (1000+ to 700 now) once people found out you’ve been followed through a train site and you’ll end up with only 4-5 quality or less users per 1 month period!. Also Twitter Trains may misuse your account to spam for their own goods (that doesn’t include the initial tweet after joining but mass tweets at some point); I haven’t received problems with Spreadmytweet, TTrain or PlzFollow, but with Free Twitter Train, even to buy a premium account, I was already forced auto followed about 15+ people as soon as I logged in!!!

Searching Twitter users via keywords: I also used Twittgeek.com to test out their functions. They let you insert a keyword, their system automatically find the Twitter users tweeting that keyword and auto-follow them. The service wasn’t that bad but first of all, you will be following people with keywords of a close-match as well, where the reason they typed in the keyword will not necessarily mean what you’d thought about; for example: dressing – dress or salad dressing. Second, you end up following 150 or 300 Twitter users (depends on free or paid service) while yourself is being followed by only two digits after the end of “following” day. To convert those you’ve followed to become your followers, you have to contact each of them and get acquainted in non-spam manners (not very feasible unless you’re using automated messaging, which will get noticed easily & get unfollowed). Not to also mention Twitter frowns upon users with very large discrepancy between following and followers ratio because following a lot means you are in hope of getting followed back and a potentially spammer.

It appears only keyword targeted searching is the only service that can close to somewhat promising to find Twitter users with similar interests as you. The other methods are just temporary ways of getting followers, where you get followers fast, get unfollowed fast, and end up with advertisers and spammers, who do not make your profile reputation look good.

My recommendation is that use the good old fashioned be an active member method. Use Twitter and tweet daily as you would. Tweet using the trending topics only if you have a reason to do so, don’t just tweet about TT just for the sake of “I tweeted in it!”. People will eventually find and follow you; sometimes this can take a long time but the people you gain that way are the people who are worthy of following back and people who will answer your tweets if you ask a question and express your thoughts!

Cheers,
Kaung | KMKBlog

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