In Business there is a saying “Turnover is Vanity, Profit is Sanity”, In Golf it is “Drive for Show, Putt for Dough”
Both alluding to the fact that it’s easy to get carried away by pointless metrics, when you should be focusing on what really matters. That is any number that takes you closer to your goals.
With Twitter, purely using follower numbers is not only a futile exercise. but could also harm your chances of using Twitter effectively for business.
Every day I am inundated with new followers who want to sell me 10,000 followers for $ 27 or some similar style of offer. As a newbie online, you may be tempted to buy some fake Twitter followers for a number of reasons.
- To increase the amount of people you can follow (especially after you hit the magic 2001 follower limitations)
- To boost your ego…. Look how many followers I have.
It’s a key area that has ruined Facebook Fan Pages for the businesses that bought fans who now find that there is no way they can reach their true fans, due to algorithms that reward engagement over volume. Twitter doesn’t have the same limitations right now, but you can be sure its coming around the corner.
It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked: Warren Buffet
Buying fake Twitter Followers is always a bad idea!
Following back relevant followers is a good idea, but you need to be on your guard that you don’t follow back these spam or fake accounts. One key reason is that once you’ve followed them back, they are likely to unfollow you, so they can follow more people. They rely on the fact that you don’t keep a close eye on who stops following your update. So now they can spam your account with affiliate links, irrelevant quotes & offers for more fake Twitter followers.
How do You spot these fake Twitter accounts?
So as you can see from the profile picture on the right its pretty easy to spot that this is a fake Twitter account.
- The bio has a google short link to mask an affiliate offer.
- The header has a very generic offer in to buy followers
- The photo in this one is pretty generic but usually fake Twitter follower accounts have headshots of good looking guys or gals
- Take a look at the actual twitter handle (Not the display name)
Here is a screen grab from a followers list on a mobile device with the Twitter App
How to Spot Fake Twitter Followers Mobile
With this one, you only have the twitter handle as a giveaway that the account is not a genuine user.
If you just follow these accounts, you could be blocking a space for genuine users who might want to do business with you.
If Twitter changes it’s rules to more of a curated feed in the future, these accounts will then come back to bite you.
They will not Retweet your posts
They will never generate any business
They won’t add value to your feed
If you want to increase your followers on Twitter, there are lots of legitimate strategies you can use.
- Write awesome, helpful content.
- Be consistent and post regularly
- Vary up your times so you reach different people
- Use # to label your tweets
- Engage with other users
There are 100’s of other ways to ensure your Twitter journey is a successful one. If you’d like to discuss how to generate sales and profit from Twitter, just contact us for a free consultation and we’l be happy to help!
Until next time!
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