Buying Twitter Followers: Black Hat Social Media Tactics

This week we will take a look at why buying Twitter followers is a very bad idea, a poor purchase, and counter productive.

Friday

10AM: 35 followers
11AM: 3000 followers
12PM: 6000 followers
1PM: 10,6k followers
2PM: 11K followers

Thus, a client torpedoed a new twitter account with 10K+ fake twitter followers—hard to watch.

“It’s simple for us to identify and suspend mass-created accounts with ’10,000 followers,’ so it’s also a terrible purchase in general,” he told Wired.com. “They’re never ‘real’ followers.” -Twitter spokesman Matt Graves (from 2010 Wired.com article regarding buying followers and friends).

Social Media: A Costly Time-suck With No Visible ROI.

Let’s start with a basic overview of social media. Picture this scenario: you have to convince your client that spending a lot of time and money (resources) on a new project is necessary but may never provide a visible monetary return on investment.

How Clients See Social Media:

Social media marketing is a “must-have”, “must-do”
Social media may never “pay-off” in a visible way.

Here is the problem: ROI is not always monetary. In the internet age, every person, and most companies have an online presence. Social media is complex and evolving and is not the same for every person or corporation. Likewise describing “the purpose” of social media is elusive. But notice: nowhere on the list that follows is Social media will make you rich. So how do we justify an investment in social media? The key is understanding that ROI is value. Let’s ask a better question: How can we value an investment in social media?

Why An Investment in Social Media Is Valuable

Establish a Brand
Establish Credibility (tell a truthful story)
Engage a Community
Go Where Your Customers Go
Learn What Your Customers Are Saying About You (Free Public Opinion Polling)
Customer Support/Service
People Share Things They Like
Social Media Is Fun

Vanity Metrics

“A useful metric is both accurate (in that it measures what it says it measures) and aligned with your goals. Making your numbers go up (any numbers–your bmi, your blood sugar, your customer service ratings) is pointless if the numbers aren’t related to why you went to work this morning.” —Seth Godin

As companies try to understand ROI/Value and social media there is the age-old temptation to over emphasize vanity metrics. Seth Godin sums it up this way: “The reason to avoid the false metric is that it messes with…the way you approach the work, with the real reason you did the project in the first place.” Fighting the temptation to fixate on vanity metrics is difficult. Giving in to vanity metrics leads to short sighted actions like buying twitter followers, or facebook likes, or other black hat social media tactics.

If we are guided by vanity metrics we look at traffic or unique visits to the corporate blog and say: “That’s nothing, this blog is costing us a lot and we only getting how many visits?” Let’s return to the notion of asking a better question:

How valuable is knowing how your customers feel about your company or product?
How much more valuable is knowing that your customers are unhappy AND having the opportunity to engage with them?

Google Knows Better: Stop Hurting Yourself.

Every social network has metrics which can be misinterpreted and become over emphasized false metrics. On Facebook it’s “likes” and “friends”. Twitter followers is the lowest hanging vanity metric. Buying twitter followers is a black hat social media tactic and of particular interest because of it’s multi-faceted negative impact. We will look at several reasons below but let’s start with Google. We’ve already discussed the temptation to fixate on traffic. If traffic is the goal, buying twitter followers is counter productive. Already two years ago Twitter was aware of the practice, and able to tell real from robot. Google likewise can easily sniff out bogus followers. Google already weighs social media for SEO rankings. And with the introduction of “Panda” Google is obviously aware of bogus/spammy account holders and is actively lowering the Google Page Rank of content farmed accounts. If traffic is your goal paying for twitter followers is counter productive.

Don’t Offend The Natives: Understanding Your Surroundings

As we discussed seeing the value of social media requires looking beyond simple metrics. But why else is buying followers a bad thing, after-all won’t thousands of followers make me look popular? The short answer: No. The key is understanding your social media ecosystem. Twitter users who are actively engaged identify fake users in seconds. An account with 10K followers, 35 tweets, 3 retweets, and 4 mentions, is not an account to follow. It’s an account to avoid.

Not only will Twitter users be inclined to avoid your bogus account and it’s army of robot followers it also diminishes your credibility (remember credibility is on our list of value-added benefits of social media). Credibility is an essential component of all interaction online. Google is constantly optimizing it’s page rank algorithm looking for the best, most relevant, most credible sources of information because that is what real people want and need.

What Twitter credibility looks like.

Credibility is Essential Online AND Offline.

Credibility is trust. But credibility is also culture (taste). Steve Jobs described taste this way: “Taste is original ideas, and bringing culture to your products.” Being credible, trusted, and tasteful is essential at every level of a business. Even frontline employees who are engaged in social media are turned off by companies that lack culture, taste and credibility. The best employees are engaged employees who will take ownership of their work want to build, and contribute to something real. Short cuts turn off employee engagement. Engaged employees will recoil from being represented online with bogus black hat social media tactics.

Fake Followers Don’t Spend Money

Social networks are quickly gathering a level of garbage that must be sorted and discarded to get to the real value. But not only will real, engaged, Twitter users not appreciate bogus followers, fake followers don’t add value. Fake followers don’t contribute anything, and ultimately fake followers don’t buy products, or services. At the end of the day isn’t that the point?

After publishing this post we did more research and found Status People Checks for Fake Twitter Followers. This handy little service takes a quick peak at your twitter followers (or your friends, co-workers, or random others) and tells you how of their followers are real, or fake.

HBR also has a great summary of different approaches to social media strategy.