Will You Pay For More Twitter Followers?
Even though most people won’t admit it they all obsess about how many Twitter followers they have. “Only three more followers and I get to 1,000″ and similar tweets appear on a fairly frequent basis in my timeline. Brands and businesses are no different expect that they have slightly more resources and can throw money at the cause through competitions, innovative campaigns and by using it as a customer service tool.
Of course, Twitter shouldn’t be all about the followers with the level of engagement being far more important, but that hasn’t stopped people trying to jockey the system with scripts over the years. All that is about to change though with Twitter announcing their own self service platform this week, which means that brands, businesses and individuals will be able to effectively buy Twitter followers.
It will be Twitter’s Facebook like button moment and they’ll start raking the cash in over the next year. But will it work for the end user? Should you and will you be being Twitter followers soon?
The Case For
For arguments sake, let’s say the followers cost $1 each. Let’s also assume that there is some pretty smart targeting in there meaning the people I target my ads are relevant by geography and perhaps even by topic. Paying $10,000 could get you a huge amount of new people following you. It’s nearly impossible to engage with that amount of new people personally, but if you were a brand and they followed you – and you tweet strong, engaging content that was retweeted and shared – this could be like marketing gold. Some brands have been on Twitter for years and have thousands of followers, but some haven’t even started yet so this new ad tool could help them get to the races very quickly indeed.
The Case Against
Personally I’ve spent about four years building up the people who follow me. I engage with them and know who a good chunk of them are. If I just added in 10,000 new people I’d have no way of knowing who they were, and I’d simply be broadcasting out to them. By all accounts, Twitter advertising is working brilliantly at the moment because there are only a handful of select partners on the site.
What happens when my feed starts getting clogged up with cheap insurance offers, credit cards, Groupon deals and massages? Twitter is your earned media and followers are often massively engaged because they have made an implicit call to follow the brand or person. Shoving the ability to follow in a person’s feed is something completely different and I’m not sure it will work. The numbers of followers will soar but engagement will drop.
