Gaming Twitter Can Cost You

Followers: its (still) the latest arms race.  I have some.  You have a different number, so one of us could get antsy about that situation.  Here’s what some people do:

People will follow you, although you have no followers or both-followings in common, and they will unfollow you if you don’t follow them shortly thereafter.  Often they have few, if any, tweets and an inordinate amount of followers for their non-activity.  You do start to wonder when you see that – 58K followers, following 59K, and has a only a record of 8 tweets.

They are using force-follow software

(Who cares which one.  Twitter follower growth software applications are things that should not be.)

When vetting new Twitter followers, it pay to consider the number of lists the account is on, and the follower ratio.

Once you have looked at enough real Twitter accounts, and have become accustomed to seeing what a non-foul account, one that is not about to be blocked en masse, we begin to develop a quick sense for judging account legitimacy.

To grow the base of followers, be sure to create quality content that feeds the audience you’re trying to reach. Be mindful of those using Twitter search as well so use keywords and hashtags that are common to your target audience. Also, think about how often your audience will tolerate hearing from you.  Use a product like Hootsuite to schedule your tweets in advance to lower the admin burden.  If you’re blogging, you can use Twitter as a means to drive more traffic to there as well.

As followers flow in, people quickly scan follower counts (not important IMO), follower/following ratio, the follower’s bio (most important to me + a scan of their recent tweets if I have time) and the number of Twitter lists the follower is on.

This number of Twitter lists is meaningful to me when I’m making a follow back or no follow decision assuming they are on authentic lists and not just auto-generated lists by services like Formulists (a service that appears to be inflating list counts more & more lately).

It’s easy to spot gamers, but when the follower’s bio and a scan of their recent tweets passes a quick sniff test, then I do look at list count and list-look before choosing to follow back or pass.  A quick scan of the follower’s lists is helpful to separate the wheat from the chaff in Tweeps.  If I have time to probe this deeply, the names of the lists and also how followed those lists are matters.  By whom a couple of the the lists that the user has created as well as the lists they are on also suggests the “twitter authority” of the account.  Factor all this in and you can judge whether the account is gamed or genuinely built.

About Saul Fleischman

Working with social web apps developers on getting things made: my role tends to be functionality ideation, user experience, and also, marketing communications and community development.

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