Social Media

Now You Can Buy Twitter Followers, But Will Any Become True Fans?

image from followersforsale.com Several services including Twitter1K and Followers For Sale have begun selling new Twitter fans by the thousands an at least one experienced internet marketer Jonathan Volk claims to have increased his Twitter following after buying just 1000 followers.

image from www.twitter1k.com "Before ordering this service, I had a negative trend in followers. After ordering I gained the followers that I paid for pretty quickly!" says Volk. "The way I understand the service to work is that these real people are paid a small fee to follow these people."

Putting aside the moral ickyness of buying followers and even if one could somehow "buy" the followers of a band whose fans might like similar music, it's hard to imagine that the transaction led to any true fans – fans who come to shows, tell there friends about you, etc.

Or am I missing something. Is this an acceptable way to jump start a Twitter following? How does this compare to the services who sold plays on MySpace and views on YouTube?

More: WIRED chronicles other Twitter marketing scams.

Bruce Houghton on 07/08/2010 in Social Media | Permalink | Comments (16)
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16 Comments

  1. I’m not convinced. If they can pay people to follow someone, that can pretty easily pay someone to say it worked.
    For me, the great thing about twitter is you have lots of little groups that all interconnect. Having 1000 followers isn’t much of an advantage, it makes it less personal.

  2. You’re not missing anything, Bruce. It’s a another sign of desperation for those striving to cut through the media clutter and noise both on and offline.
    For an internet marketer like Volk, it gets him publicity and maybe better paying consulting gigs. For a band, it might lead to short term gains like convincing a promoter to book them or a label to sign them (if labels are still signing) but won’t do anything to create a long term career. The most they can hope for is those followers lead to a financial windfall that they can bank for the future. Even that is dubious.

  4. Buying followers is less effective then paying to have your concert flier put in the junk mail handouts the post office crams in your mail box. Simply put, they go straight to the recycle bin; they’re ignored.
    After 5 years of bands using “bots” to collect myspace friends only to watch the effort provide zero results, how or why would anyone fall for this? If you want to succeed that start an engaging and intelligent conversation with people who really care about what you have to say. There are short cuts in life, nearly all of them lead to failure. This one apparently cost around 40 bucks.

  5. Yes a fool and his money soon part and I would be very careful before actually paying to buy followers, but think about this. You can, or used to be able to buy list of music purchasers, so this, assuming its not a scam is not that bad, even from an “icky” point of view. Marketers buy lists all the time.
    If its legit, and you send a twit to those people asking them to visit your website and give a listen to your music, if you’ve targeted the right people,a decent percentage will check out your music. After that, its up to your music to keep them.
    Say you bought a 1000 followers @ $0.05 a pop for a grand total of $50 and just 50 followed through (my guess is, since its new, a lot more will, especially if you are not “selling” anything upfront) and you ended up selling your CD for $5 to just 20, you more than make out.
    It could work, assuming every other band doesn’t jump on the band wagon and it becomes spam/junkmail or in this case, junktwit.

  7. One way I think this might be useful for me is so I can nudge my following over the 2000 mark which will allow me to follow more real people I am interested in who will follow me back. Once you follow 2000 Twitter doesn’t allow you to follow any more until you get 2000 followers. I’m stuck at around 1600 now. There are a couple hundred celebs and such that I want to keep following whether or not they follow back.

  8. I recently purchased 10,000 twitter followers on http://www.socialkik.com and they delivered them in less than a couple of months…
    I was a little hesitant but after wasting over an hour a day babying my Twitter profile and hoping to get more followers, the count was not increasing… so I decided to buy followers from services like Usocial and Socialkik.
    Some would argue that buying followers is senseless but I don’t see any difference between buying adwords from Google and buying Facebook fans and twitter followers from services like Usocial and Socialkik, they’re both supposed to drive traffic to your site… except that the fans and followers are always going to be there to see page wall updates about you or your business. It simply like buying an audience.
    What’s also cool is that now we have more followers than our competition who have been over 5 years in business before we launched our business online… which make us look way more popular and we can already see the return on investment reflecting on our sales numbers 🙂

  9. Offer to donate money for each new follower you get. Or alternatively, promise you’ll donate money if you reach a certain follower milestone. Rest assured that you’re on the honor system here – no one will be able to verify if you really made the donation or not.

  10. I agree. It is rediculous as well as unneccessary to buy twitter follers. I pick up twenty to thirty followers a day simply by being proactive. I follow who my followers follow and their followers follow me. Ninety percent of people will return your follow. You can do this on your own.There is no such thing as overnight success.

  14. I will tell you the truth about buying twitter followers.I was looking for information how to get more followers for my business and I came across a lot of freelancers and sites promoting their twitter followers services in forums and blogs.The result was that all of them swear to deliver you high quality followers but the reality is far from it.
    And me and my team have decided to do an experiment to find really worthy suppliers.
    Experiment includes 5 sites:
    twitter1k.com
    buytwitterfollowers.com
    twitterfollowershop
    buy-followers.org
    buyafollower.com
    We bought 1000 targeted and 1000 non targeted followers from each site.
    And tested with same method to measure click through rate and money made.(will not go into detail….)
    The result was a bit disappointing:
    All non targeted followers did not earn even a penny and clicks were also very low,maybe followers from http://www.twitter1k.com was a bit better than others.
    Targeted followers were better but only followers from http://www.buy-followers.org made some money for us and clicks were very high.These followers seems to be really targeted in what we offer that’s why they are worth investing money.
    Conclusion
    Buy only targeted followers

  15. Unless there is something that I haven’t learnt about yet I absolutely do not believe these services run by paying people to follow someone. Buying Twitter followers or Facebook Fans may be easy for the user but the website or company who are selling the packages actually do work to find the followers, whether they be targeted followers or untargetted followers. I have spent countless sleepless nights finding followers for my clients from followers4u.com and every single one of them has mentioned an increase in brand recognition and increased traffic as a direct result of purchasing followers and fans. It is no different than paying for advertising or marketing except that the followers can become a more permanent audience if the Twitter or Facebook page administrators actually learn how to successfully engage them.

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