Twitter Shenanigans

by Stuart Foster on February 5, 2009

Over the past couple of months (but this week especially) I have begun to encounter people on Twitter (who I had never heard of) with abnormally large amounts of followers. The first thing I though to myself is I gotta follow them! They must be sharing some kind of valuable and useful information that I could learn a great deal from them. Heck if you have 15,000 followers...you must be doing something right. However, then I looked at the amount of tweets that they had: 250, 149, 1,000. Huh? I have been hardcore tweeting for about 7 months. I have nearly 3,000 tweets and only 1400 followers. What were these twitter users doing that I was not? How were they gaining followers at such a rapid pace? Could they be adding insane value to their followers?

I had to find out. So I asked around the Twittersphere, how could these users who I've never heard of gain so many followers? The answer of course was a script from Greasemonkey.

Essentially what the script does is seek out Twitter users who leave their "Auto-Follow" functionality turned on (and likely haven't visited the account in some time). Thus the users of said script are able to add followers in a rapid fashion...they are guaranteed an automatic follow back. Essentially it's a win-win for everyone right? Wrong. Although the amount of followers on Twitter is a great way to judge credibility of a user it should not be your only factor in deciding whether or not to follow said user. The gaming that takes place on Social Media networks will always be present. Some people want to take shortcuts to gain notoriety, interest, and buzz about themselves without contributing anything meaningful to the community. This is detrimental to the community as a whole.

Why is this a problem? Many new twitter users (myself included when I started out) view a follower count as the first best litmus test of whether to follow someone. If that person is adding value and being that interesting to that many people...how can I go wrong by following said person? Unfortunately, often these accounts aren't reputable and will provide bad or even worse, misleading advice to new users and users who might happen to be casual users.

What can we do to stop this epidemic? Well, a variety of options exist:

1. A rework of the auto-follow code to block the functionality of the Greasemonkey script (not a programmer...so no idea how this would be done. Assuming this would be done in-house on Twitter's end).

2. Ask around...the best way to learn from Twitter is to ask questions. So learn from others whether or not a person is legit or not.

3. Check out their follower to following ratio. Most enterprising users tend to follow fewer people then are following them. The reason being they probably don't know you yet and are waiting to see what kind of value you will bring.

4. Just use common sense. If someone has 250 tweets and 31,000 followers. They aren't legit unless they are a celebrity. (Think @THE_REAL_SHAQ)

People trying to beat the system is not a new phenomenon. It will always be a problem insocial media because of that first word: social. Everyone can be on Twitter...no real limitations exist at the moment to prevent you from gaming the system. However, if we work together we can stop some of these people from gaining ground and spreading misinformation. Twitter isn't about your follower count. It's about what you learn from your followers and the connections that you make. So have fun, don't be a Farva...and be wary of Twitter Shenanigans .

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