Twitter actually can be fun. That is, unless you follow 7500 spam accounts.
A few months ago I got really tired of Twitter and decided to test some stuff out on my account. I wanted to see how many followers I could get without doing any actual work. The (maybe) surprising result is that you can get just about as many followers as you want. The bad news is that none of them are doing any real work either.
Let’s take a closer look at how I completely screwed my account, and then we’ll take a look at how to fix it too.
The journey to getting tons of followers starts with the assumption that at least some of the people you follow will eventually follow you back. So the first step is:
1. Follow a ton of people.
There are scripts to help with this so you don’t actually have to do all of the pointing and clicking. I set a script up on a cron-job (sounds dirty, doesn’t it?) to follow a ton of people every night around 2am.
But at some point… I can’t remember exactly where… Twitter steps in and says you can’t follow anyone else until some people start following you back. There is a golden ratio of following-to-followers that twitter won’t let you stray too far out of because it’s obviously just spam.
So we have to…
2. Unfollow some of the people that didn’t follow us back.
Some people just aren’t going to follow you back automatically (thank God!) so you have to boot them from your follow list because you need those spots for bots that autofollow back. (Tongue squarely in cheek).
So you use a script that goes through and stops following anyone who isn’t following you back. This is a nasty thing to do, and truly what ruins your twitter experience. I mean, quite simply, NPR isn’t going to follow me- but I still really really want to see updates from them otherwise how will I know what to think or say at dinner parties? (PS: I do love NPR, but am well aware of it’s liberal bias. But reality has a well-know liberal bias.)
3. Cron Job it and forget about enjoying twitter.
So now that you have your auto-following going, and your auto-unfollow-people-who-don’t-follow-you going, you have exactly what you need to get tons of irrelevant followers and tweets. Yee haw.
I set my cron-jobs up to run the follow script, wait about 22 hours, unfollow anyone who didn’t follow my back by then, and then follow people again. Rinse, wash, repeat.
And over time your number keeps growing and growing. It’s nasty how many followers you can get.
The Problem…
…Is obvious. Twitter starts to suck. Even though you have a tonne of followers, they are all spammers. Why? Because the only twitter users who will follow you back within 20 hours are spam bots.
{Which, as a side note, it a HUGE problem on twitter and will have to be tackeled somehow ASAP. Moving on…}
Another problem is that your Direct Messages get overrun with spam too. See, you can only send a DM to someone who follows you. And if I’m the sucker that is following 7500 spammers… well guess who gets invited to “Test my IQ”. Me.
How to Fix It:
Stop following EVERYONE. And start fresh. I’m pretty sure it’s the only way.
As a side benefit, you also get this glorious moment when you are following no one and there are a ton of people following you. You are glowing with a flavor of vanity that wasn’t even available a couple of years ago…
Thank you twitter.
Want More out of WordPress?
I can show you how to get more traffic, make WordPress do amazing things, and how to make more money with your website by converting your visitors into customers. Click the button to the right to get a free estimate.
