Making and Selling Imaginary Friends (aka Twitter Follower Flogging)

For any company tempted to spend money on buying Twitter followers like this below (from the BBC):

Australian social media marketing company uSocial is offering a paid service that finds followers for users of the micro-blogging service.

Followers are available in blocks starting at $87 (£53) for 1,000. The biggest block uSocial is selling is 100,000 people.

USocial said businesses and individuals were queuing up to use its follower finding service. Leon Hill, chief executive of uSocial, said the company finds potential followers by searching Twitter and working out what individual users are interested in. It also profiles where people are so it can more closely match users with those they might want to follow.

USocial then sends messages to potential followers telling them about the new Twitter user they might want to follow.

"It's up to the user to follow them or not," said Mr Hill. He added that uSocial continues to look for followers until the specified number had signed up.

USocial has about 150 customers that had bought followers and had another 80-90 campaigns about to roll out.

But how will it work?

Anyone trying to do that to me, I'm going to block them as spam, as I suspect so will many others - maybe not the first time, but certainly the 3rd or 4th. And unless they have some kind of special deal with Twitter, that behaviour will get them removed in short order, or having to continually spam from new addresses, which - again, unless they have some kind of special deal with Twitter - will get them removed in short order.

In other words for this to work you have to believe there are a large number of followers out there (true) who will follow DesperateCo Nos 1(unlikely), No 2 (bollocks), No 3 (f*ck off) etc etc amd no one will complain, block, write filter scripts etc or just ignore.

Not to mention the cringeing bad publicity it will bring in this unfamiliar Habitat ( Second Life Second time round anyone? )

Clearly this scheme could only have been invented by those who know how much we love telephone spam, internet spam, popups etc etc - and bought by those who know how much companies who do this are loved. In non-connected media it maybe worked - its an externality cost on the 99.8% of the users to gain the 0.2% who sign up. On interconnected Social media it backfires very fast as everyone starts to talk about it etc etc, and works in concert to stop it.

Far, far easier to manufacture your own users and sell those to these desperate clients. Real Twitter users are left unmolested, DesperateCo thinks they are "on Twitter" but don't actually irritate any real users (thats good for them actually, no bad publicity!) and SocialCo laughs all way to bank.

Hmmm..I wonder how many of the new Twitter users we read about are actually machine generated for these services. Lessee, at £50 a thousand, assuming you want a c £5m pa turnover thats 100 million users I have to "invent" per annum.

(In other words, Twitter's entire 20m user base is worth a mere £1m a pop......assuming this is market pricing, that $500m price tag for Twitter is looking a tad hard to justify)