Do Automated Twitter Follower Programs Actually Work?

When you have a business online, the number of people that follow your business is a huge deal. This a different paradigm than having an offline business. When you have an offline business you can have a customer come into the store, purchase an item, and never have any interaction with this person for another six months. As soon as they need your product again, they will come into your store and purchase it. When you are dealing with an online business, the competition is more fierce since you are dealing with competitors from across the globe. One of the ways that people choose to use your store over others is the word of mouth that it receives. When people see comments on your blog or large twitter follower numbers, they figure that you might know what you are talking about and that your brand must be trusted by others. Why else would you have so many followers? There are several web sites that have found out how to cheat the system by gathering large following numbers automatically. The question is, does it work?

To answer that question, it must depend on how the automated program gathered those followers up. Some of the automated programs have figured out a way to get Twitter bots to follow an account automatically. Twitter bots are the spam accounts that you will see when you look at the list of who is following you. This is a great strategy for increasing your follower count but not in the long run. It makes your account look more popular than what it actually is. If people actually look at your followers list and see nothing but spam accounts then they will have serious reservations about following you. This is at best a temporary solution and something that will not help you in the long term. Twitter regularly destroys spam accounts, which means that your follower rate will drop off significantly after they do.

There are other web sites that gather followers by creating a sort of daisy chain effect. Members will promise to follow one another to help increase their follower count. This use to be a regular activity on social networking sites such as Myspace. Now it has found its way to Twitter. This is a better solution than having spam bots follow you since you have real accounts in your follower list. This is still only a temporary solution since your new followers will not really be interested in anything you have to say. There is no way that you can leverage all of your followers into creating legitimate income. You will have to spam them and hope some of them, naively, click on the link.

All of these methods may prove to be decent short term solutions but the best way to use Twitter for building your business is to create a legitimate follower count. This way you know that you will have a base of people that are truly interested in your product. Then you can leverage that into making money.