This is from a rant about people who game Twitter by using software to artificially inflate their Follower counts, a practice that Twitter is cracking down on now according to Jesse Stay.
Twitter is inherently based on a follower count. You follow people, people follow you. A decent number of followers is about 50-100. Yet some people on Twitter have 60-90 thousand.
Thousand!
Are these individuals celebrities? Have they made such monumental marks on society that thousands of people want access to their mind?
No. Most are Realtors from Florida. Self-proclaimed experts in social media, SEO, marketing.
Spymaster is just the first of many viral games coming to Twitter … Ultimately, Twitter is going to need to step up with better filters on their end to stop these type of things from people who don’t want them. Otherwise, you’re going to have people being forced to unfollow people they may not otherwise want to unfollow. And that simply doesn’t make for a very good social service.
You can have thousands of followers and be completely unable to drive the traffic or interest that someone with only a few thousand followers can.
So why bother getting a bunch followers that could care less about who you are or what you do? Followers who in fact are only following you so that you will follow them.
If your goal is to be truly influential, or to drive sales, interest and attention, then gaming is pointless. Having thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of followers will not ensure success on Twitter.
When building a base of followers, don’t go out and spam huge groups of people and hope they follow you. That’s a pretty unauthentic way to dialogue with consumers. On the other hand, we monitor for conversations about us and then follow those people and hope they follow us because we know they are interested. We have found they are usually glad to have us reach out to them.
“If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading. If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.”
It’s truly my belief (and hey, I may be wrong, it happens sometimes) that all the people using twitter as a Guy Kawasaki commercial are talking to each other, and it’s the people who are talking about cats and Starbucks – and telling dick jokes – that are making the truly important connections.
Monetizing your Twitter stream for self gain is – to me – akin to trying to sell off your sister on the street corner for a few bucks to stuff in your back pocket. On the other side of the coin though I could see where this could be a good relationship between Twitter and its users if the in stream advertising was a co-operative deal between the user and Twitter. It would have to have very strong limits in place but I could see a shared ad revenue model for Twitter for in-stream ads where they get to pay back the sugar daddies and we get a few bucks to pay Starbucks with (or to donate to a worthy cause) – but only if we agree to it individually.
1. The First rule of Twitter Club is that you Don’t Spam
Look, we all know you have exciting content for all of us to share. But stop constantly bugging your followers about it.
2. The Second rule of Twitter Club is that you DO NOT Spam.
Let’s not turn this amazing medium into another venue for people to peddle their affiliate marketing products and latest MLM scams. The best way to get people to read your stuff is to create REAL compelling content for them to read, and sorry, they’re just not buying the latest get rich quick scheme that you’ve been duped into. Merely providing an RSS feed onto your twitter feed (check out TwitterFeed) is enough to let your network know about your latest posts.
Everyone hates spammers. Don’t ever SPAM your twitter followers because you can’t get a bad reputation back and it’s just a nasty thing to do anyway. If all you do is post affiliate links people will unfollow you and rightly so. Remember #2 above, add value.
