Popularity on Twitter is gauged in the amount of followers you can achieve. It’s a sad fact of life, but ultimately unavoidable.
There are many tactics employed by individuals and businesses to garner more disciples. Of course the organic method of following and re-following is the most widely acceptable. Some will spam the system with messages containing numerous hash tags (# – denotes a trend topic) and wait for people to find them. There are others who employ a robot system to simply follow thousands of people discussing certain topics, in the hope that a percentage will reciprocate.
However, an Australian firm have now come up with a far quicker, if costlier method. Essentially, if you pay them a subscription fee, uSocial will provide you with the followers. Top end packages, which include 100,000 over the course of a year, will set you back a little over £2100. It isn’t the first service to do something similar and doubtless it won’t be the last either.
It’s a bit of a grey area in terms of legitimacy and value. uSocial claim that each Twitter user is worth 6p a month. However, is paying for the pleasure of having these people following you against the moral code of social media?
There are no guarantees in marketing yourself through web 2.0, but surely this is one of the more extreme endeavours out there. What value will somebody really bring to your account? Particularly of course, if they are willing to sign up to be one of the thousands of Twitter users following these paid accounts.
Twitter can be easily manipulated, this is further evidence of that. With 32 million members there is a huge marketing potential. But, surely, it has to be a little more targeted than simply buying mutual friendships?
What do you think?