Twitter Marketing: Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users

By David Eedle |

Maki over on the Dosh Dosh blog has a great article on the uselessness of bulk following thousands of people on Twitter. She quite rightly points out that having large numbers of followers means squat.

The only problem is that these are low-value followers. Not because they are dumb or socially inferior but because a good amount of these followers are not ultra-targeted, active or responsive. Many of them are self-promoters, spammers or automated feed accounts. These people aren’t interested in you. They don’t care about you. They didn’t REALLY opt-in. They even followed you automatically, didn’t they?

Maki talks about the idea of a ‘cultivated’ list where you follow people who offer you value – whether commercial or personal.

I’ve dropped a comment in saying:

You’re spot on with this article. When I started using Twitter I madly followed everyone in sight. And a bunch followed back, mostly because of automatic follow tools. I quickly realised that a large number of the people I followed were just low rent marketers who only ever twitter get rich quick scheme links.

So in recent times I’ve started to aggressively unfollow these people. They contribute nothing to the community.

I do use Twitter with a commercial imperative, I have an eBook we’re about to launch, and obviously Twitter provides a valuable way of reaching an audience. However, it’s not the only marketing strategy, and we view Twitter as a long term activity, building up a profile around my area of expertise and interest.

Now I actively chase down people who I think make a contribution in my particular area (subscription content), if they follow back, then great, but that’s not my overriding objective.

I’ve been having a bit of fun with this in recent weeks. As part of my research into some of the lower forms of internet marketing I set up a couple of autoblogs – blogs that just grab content from other sources, and display related Google Ads. One of those ’secret’ ways of making money online propagated by some internet marketing merchants. Of course, the income is miniscule, a dollar a day if you are lucky.

As part of the exercise I hooked up Twitter accounts, and using services like Twollow, it automatically follows people based on the key words I’ve selected for my autoblogs. Lo and behold, a bunch follow back. One of my autoblogs has picked up a couple of hundred followers in the last week. The complete joke is that many of them are autoblogs themseleves. It’s robots following robots. Completely worthless.

Keep up the good work.

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