So you have this new twitter account and now you need some followers, what are you to do? You know that people look down on buying followers, so then you hear about this thing called #TeamFollowBack or the Twitter Follow Train.
How it works is simple … you follow everyone in who teams #TeamFollowBack and in return they follow you. You follow 5,000 people, 5,000 people follow you back.
Sounds great, right? Well … turns out not so much.
What is the point of getting people to follow you? That’s really what you need to define before you can answer how great it is to buy or do team follow back.
Is the point so people don’t look at your account and go OMG they have 12 followers ewww? Or is the point so that your fans or followers can interact with you, find out what’s going on with you and perhaps buy some of your goodies?
That’s what Twitter SHOULD be about for you. Social media marketing is about marketing you (your brand) and the people you buy followers from aren’t real people and the same it turns out goes for follow train people either.
I did some extensive testing on three twitter accounts and these are my results.
- I bought 15,000 followers on an undisclosed account.
- I did team follow train and got 5,000 followers.
- I did it the hard way and tried to build up my account by being active.
I started all three test accounts on the exact same day (with exception of #3 see below) I made sure to give them real looking names, profiles and pictures. I tweeted exactly the same thing on all three accounts.
I made sure that with all three accounts I tweeted with the 80/20 ratio meaning that 8 out of every 10 things I said were about general stuff like the weather, what I was doing that day – no links. The other 20% of my tweets were pictures, promos, and whatnot.
Account 1 with 15,000 followers had a 0 rate of engagement. Out of about 600 tweets, not a single re-tweet, comment, or click through, nothing. LOL
Account # had 5,000 followers and in return I followed 5,000 people. My stream was full of their team follow back tweeting spam but you know what? That’s all they tweeted about. Those people were so busy getting new followers and tweeting about that, it’s all they talked about. I got 1 click through, from 600 total tweets, no comments, no re-tweets. It was almost like buying followers, only worse because now my stream is full of jackasses going on about #TeamFollowBack.
Account #3 had 312 followers. LOL I’m sorry but it was all I could get. I had to really work for those guys using creative hash tags, etc. In all I tweeted the same 600 tweets as the other two accounts but I also tweeted 83 additional tweets, each time using creative #hashtags and comments to other people’s tweets that I was following.
In the end my return was 21 click throughs, 6 retweets and 17 comments. 21 out of 312 was a hell of a result.
So it turns out the only way to have any sort of financial success with your twitter account is to have real followers and actually interact with them. Tweeting 400 ads won’t do anything for you. If you want to have a successful twitter account then you need to actually tweet real things. Talk about the weather, talk about some TV show you are watching or your favorite sporting event. Talk talk talk That’s the key to success on twitter.