Despite making my living selling stuff people hopefully want to read or talk about, my business is just like yours. Though my digital content company has a good number of followers and friends, I struggle to turn Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the social media mafia into real money.
So about a month ago I started an experiment: I treated Twitter just like any other direct marketing medium. I began to study the dozens of online social marketing companies that promised to sell me Twitter followers, Facebook likes and YouTube views.
Most had little contact info, names like Twiends and Likes and Followers and the feel of your average web hustle. But one firm stood out: Miami-based Buy Fans Today. The site had clear pricing, specific enough contact information and a big, bold phone number. When I called it I promptly got in touch with one R.W. Goldberg, the company's founder, who promised that $430 would buy me 5,000 real followers in roughly a month.
"We are in the business of offering social media enhancement, which has become the crack cocaine of the new media world," Goldberg says. "You have to be a social media player if you want to be a player."
I want to be a player, so I decided to give it a try.
Twitter Fame?
Considering that I was risking my own personal identity and I wanted a controlled Twitter account to measure results against, I tested Buy Fans Today on the company Twitter feed of my sports tech blog (@sportscircuit), not my personal account (@blumsday).
Sure enough, as promised, in about a week Twitter followers of @sportscircuit grew from about 35 to just north of 3,147. That's several hundred new followers every 24 hours or so. I did not have to give my account info to Buy Fans Today if I chose not to. I was not escorted to the door by the Twitter cops. Nor did I receive hate messages or any negative mentions from my existing followers.
Buy Fans Today is no instant cash machine. The vast majority of my new followers have only tweeted 5 to 10 times. They have limited followings--usually around 50, and some far less. These are not the active followers who drive real traffic or revenue. Goldberg says that's the reality of Twitter. Most users are not active and don't tweet much.
And as far as those followers being interested in my Twitter feed?
"We only can geotarget our follows. We are not able to optimize for age or topic or anything like that," Goldberg says. "We go out and find people who legitimately follow you. What you do with them is up to you."
So far, I have not been able to turn this amorphous group of new Twitter followers into a real audience. Traffic at my blog is not up dramatically. So there is no firm way to measure the return on my investment just yet.
But the traffic from my real followers is not up either, and 5,000-plus followers does count for something in the nutty social media world. The bottom line: Yes, some of these followers may not be real. But is it Buy Fans Today's fault that social media is so bizarre that whether or not my followers are real is almost beside the point?
This article was originally published in the June 2011 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Rented Friends.
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Comments:
I think social buying is increases day by day Because most of the brands uses social media as a business platform & most of the people are linked with different social media sites.
I need 5000 twitters followers for improve our business can you guide me which stretedgy you use for followers please define here because i am seo optimizer last week i start project this is my personal project i need 5000 followers how much payment you required for this task.
Coming from a blogger's perspective, everything centers around social media metrics when it comes to a blog (or blogger's) potential pull. You're asked, "How many Twitter followers do you have?" or "How many Facebook likes does your fan page have?" when you should be asked, "What's your average level of engagement from Twitter followers and Facebook fans?" Powers that be have boiled "influence" down to numbers when, as you discovered through your experiment, it's much more than just a number.
Jonathan, your article left me feeling like you see nothing wrong with the business that "sells" Twitter followers, even if those followers will never do the buyer one bit of good when it comes to traffic, no matter WHAT the buyer does next. The followers you bought have less than 50 followers of their own? And their profiles are inactive, with as few as 5 or 10 tweets? There's not a thing you CAN do with followers like that if you want traffic to your website, Jonathan. You wasted your $430, and it sounds like the CEO knows very little about social media, or how Twitter works when it comes to traffic. I could sell lists all day long that are targeted for way more than geolocation, but it would take work and time. Two of my Twitter lists are private -- they're called "New England Businesses," and they're filled only with profiles that are being used regularly. No dead accounts. I've gone further and designated them as RI-based or not, and if I wanted to, I could target them even tighter by designating what kind of business each one is, and how influential they are with their own audiences. I wrote a blog post about your article and called it "Buying Twitter Followers and Facebook Friends, or the Emperor Has No Clothes," and invite your response! Your article at least made me realize that I'd bought into the Grand Illusion myself -- for a moment. I'm seeing a bit clearer now!
People considering this tactic should be warned that while buying Twitter followers is the social media version of going 5 miles over the speed limit on the freeway (most cops don't care), it is against Twitter's TOS. Erick
When looking at a business Twitter account, I do think many Twitter followers look at the number of followers the account has as a way to decide how legitimate or cool or interesting it is before they decide to commit to following it. So buying followers may have some benefit by making your account look more popular to real potential followers.