Jakob Knudsen
Twitter is a great tool for business, because it gives you instant access to a large group of consumers. But how do you promote your brand on Twitter? When you look at successful brands their Twitter accounts often have thousands of followers. As a small business it can seem daunting to reach such numbers and pointless to be tweeting to your own meagre following.
A Trick You Could Use
But it is not difficult to grow a large following. There are many ways to increase your Twitter audience and we have tested one of them. It is known as the ‘shady’ tactic of mass following and unfollowing and Flutter is one of many tools designed for this purpose.
The Flutter-app is a third party add-on to Twitter that will almost automate the process of finding relevant Tweeters to follow and unfollow for you.
In this interview with the developer he explains how it works.
Our Experiment
In our experiment we used an account with great, regular content and many followers. We followed the maximum allowed number of Tweeters every day for five days and unfollowed the ones who did not follow us back after one day had elapsed.
The immediate response was positive with 63 new followers after the first day.
People are happy to be followed
Ethics
But ethical concerns started to creep in, when we received the first warning from Twitter.
First warning
A quick browse around the web confirmed our suspicion. This type of behaviour is not allowed by the Twitter terms of service.
Spam: You may not use the Twitter service for the purpose of spamming anyone. What constitutes “spamming” will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be spamming are:
- If you have followed and/or unfollowed large amounts of users in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive following or follower churn);
Conclusion of the experiment
After the warning we throttled the following to half speed, but continued the experiment for four more days and gained a total of 150 followers. While this may seem like a good amount we will not recommend the Flutter-app or any other mass follow/unfollow tool to anyone.
Here are three reasons is worth the risk or your time for three reasons:
- It is against the terms of service of Twitter and it may get your account suspended
- It is unethical and not worth the risk
- The followers gained using this tactic are of low quality, compared to those who follow you because of your content
Use the best practice approach instead
The conventional approach is to create an interesting Twitter profile with great, regular content. Interact with other Tweeters in by taking part in discussions and remember to favorite and retweet the tweets you like. In time people will notice that you are active and start to interact with you. If you want to speed up the process you should look into bringing traffic to your Twitter account from other sites with links or paid advertising.
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