Are Your Tweeter Followers Real?

Now, every Tom Dick and Harry has a Twitter account. It the vogue of this century. You are outdated and not in touch if you still haven’t registered your name with Twitter. If you have a blog or a web site, your Twitter followers will grow at such an amazing pace that you probably think you are one famous netizen or one kick-ass blogger.

Check your email. Every day, you will receive at least 4 or 5 emails notifying you of so and so following you on tweeter. All the Toms, Dicks And Harrys have somehow “discovered” you. You must be famous. Your blog must be real good. Else why are you attracting so many new followers daily. Your RSS subscribers have remained stagnant at below 100 even after 3 years of blogging but your twitter followers have surpassed the 300 mark in a few short months. You must be doing something great, so up goes the twitter followers chicklet, to proudly show off your number of followers. In another few short months the count will be thousands.

Well, if this is a discouragement, I am sorry, but the majority of your followers are Dicks. Toms and Harrys has better and more constructive things to do than you follow your pathetic little tweets.

Do realize that first and foremost, Twitter is a social playground. Friends get together and tweet short and sweet information among themselves. It was only much later that it mutated into what it is today. All the hoo haa that Twitter is a micro blog is bullshit. So be surprise when you get a new follower. Ask yourself, “Why the fuck are these people following me?” And when you answer, try to be truthful. To yourself at the very least. If you can’t find an reasonably good answer to justify the reason, then something fishy must be going on.

Why the hell are you being followed. There are 2 main reasons.

Visit your new follower’s site or blog. They are sure to have one. 6 out of ten times, all those new followers are crappy internet vultures out to make a fast buck. They are casting their Net to catch that proverbial blind fish. Think big and think wide, there are more than 120 million Tweeter users out there. Imagine the vastness of this ocean and imagine the number of blind fishes inside if you cast your net wide enough. There are automated services and software to do the tiring following job. One click of the mouse and thousands of “follows” goes out. All they want is for you to check them out once you receive that notification email. 90 percent of the time, noobs do check them out, since they are so exited of getting a new follower.

The other 4 times are people trying to hook you into following them back. They too are casting their nets with all those automated Tweet following software and services. Most of them will have a blog and bloggers being bloggers, normally reciprocate. You follow me, I follow you back. So in no time, each and every Twitterers will have hundreds of followers. 90 percent fakes.

Don’t believe me? Go do and experiment. Go tweet a question. See how many responds you get from the hundreds of “followers” . Then you know how many real ones you got.

Get this. Tweeter works only for these people.

1. Sites that offers the latest news
2. Sites that offers or at least believed to be offering valuable resources and information (like all the A listers)
3. Site or blog owners who has lots of loyal friends and readers beforehand.
4. Sites that has thousands of members who needs to be updated quick and fast.
5. Social animals who has hundreds of friends online that needs to be kept in touch regularly.

Other than that, don’t get overly ecstatic when you receive those email notifications. By the rate that I am getting those mails, my follower status should be around 5k by now.  However, it is still under 400. Why? I never follow back and I never check those new followers, so they wipe this good-for-nothing off their list. Out of the  400, I think not more than 30 are my real followers. The other 300 plus are phantoms who never check their tweets.