twitter fail blog

The website StatusPeople.com is another one of the many many many many many social media management programs on the market. They let you do such social things as auto-posting rss feeds and schedule all your social media messages ahead of time, so you don’t have to interact with anyone, ever. Like sending a mp3 player as your proxy to the next party, so you don’t have to mingle with the little people.

Why are we even mentioning this at all?

Because we tried, unsuccessfully, to post a comment to their blog. In a post titled, “Are you a Twitter Faker?” they said “The number of people buying fake followers on Twitter to look more legitmate is a growing problem.” (sic)

We typed up a nice comment, decrypted the captcha, clicked the submit button, and their blog said, “You did not submit a valid comment.” How the H-E-double hockey sticks does their blog know whether our comment is valid or not? Pretty judgmental piece of software, if you ask us.

Here’s what we said:

People have been buying followers as far back as 2009. Maybe even before that. This problem started as soon as businesses joined twitter. Many “social media gurus” who have been on twitter since the beginning have a high number a followers because they used automated tools to gain them very quickly. Some promised to follow everyone who followed them, using the hashtag #teamfollowback, while others simply created thousands of accounts and followed themselves. Others used Twitter Trains, Twitter Pyramids, and other such schemes. You’d be surprised, if you look into their twitter history, to find out how many of these movers and shakers bought followers in one fashion or another.

Once people realize (will they ever?) that it’s not the number of followers, but the amount of interaction you share with your “tweeps” that makes for a successful twitter account, these twitter follower buying services will dry up and go away.

Yeah, right. It will never happen.

They have an app on their website you can use to see how many fake followers you have. NEWS FLASH: Everyone has fake followers. We’re guessing that legitimate accounts that are active on twitter probably have a higher percentage of fake followers than the less active accounts. This is because bots follow a lot of people, just to gain the automatic follow-back. If you use their tool and find that you have 10%, 20% or more fake followers, you can freak out, or recognize that it’s just the nature of the beast. Stop focusing on the numbers and start interacting with the people who have signed on to listen to what you have to say.

There you go. Was this a valid comment? Let us know what you think by leaving a valid comment in the comments.