I tested it for you: buying Twitter followers!
Published on 27 September 2012
For a while now I've been curious about the whole thing, more for the joke than anything, of buying followers on Twitter. I'm always a little fascinated by these sites that pop up everywhere, offering to instantly get you 500, 1,000, 10,000 followers on your Twitter account for some amount of money, just like that, without lifting a finger, without even being funny. What's the point of doing that? Really? Two scenarios:
- You're a brand, an artist. Clearly, having 63 followers on the counter is ridiculous. If you have 2 or 3,000, you already look a lot less like a noob. In that case, I can see the appeal. So you buy followers, and one of two things happens. It slips through unnoticed, nobody catches on, and you're cool. Or it shows, and people rip you to shreds, that happened to the Fred&Farid agency for example. Humiliation, the whole deal.
- You're just yourself. Like, just some guy saying stuff on the Internet. Well, it's kind of the same in the end. If you have 16 followers, most of the influential Twitter jerks won't reply to you. I know, I'm one of them. But if you've got a crowd on the counter, then yeah, you matter (also works if you're a hot girl in your profile pic). And clearly, the more followers you have, the more you gain, that's just how it is, we'd rather follow winners (me) than losers (everyone else). It's completely idiotic, obviously, and it stops plenty of really funny or insightful people from breaking through on global Twitter.
Okay, so how do you buy them?
For me it was really dumb: a disgusting bot sent me its sleazy ad to sell me followers. As usual, I was about to ban it, then I hesitated, and I clicked the link, JUST TO SEE. I landed on this page:
Okay, $5, so roughly 3-4 euros, for 2,000 followers. That's just NOTHING, it's the price of half a sandwich at my bakery. You know what? I said DEAL.
There you go, I clearly committed to the whole thing right to the end, for the lols, tweeting the play-by-play. Honestly I thought it was a scam, but 3 or 4 euros on PayPal wasn't going to kill me. Once I'd paid my few euros, nothing. Nada. So I waited. Then I forgot. AND THEN, DISASTER STRUCK. After a few hours, things kicked into gear:
And sure enough, in less than an hour, I got slapped with a little over 2,000 followers in the face. Always the same profile, fewer than 15 followers each, all girl avatars, and random bios.
Real filthy bots, then. No fuss, they all showed up at the same time. Then it settled down, it was done, I went from under 5,000 followers to over 7,000. Without being funny, without going viral, nothing, just by dropping 3 euros. The graph says it all:
The result of all this? Well, nothing, it was funny, and I'm suddenly 2,000 bots richer, which serve no purpose except making the various agencies believe I'm A LITTLE more influential than I actually am. That said, ever since crossing 7,000, I feel like my follower growth curve has picked up, I really believe that the bigger your follower count, the more attractive you become. What's ugly about all this is that I could have bought not 2,000 but 10,000 followers, for barely more money, and above all pinned them on anyone. Enough to start nasty rumors about fake cheaters in the world of global Twitter. On the flip side, if you want to make a buddy on Twitter happy, you can always buy them a few thousand followers, it's cheaper than a box of chocolates!
Photo credit: AI-generated illustration
By Paingout