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I have written a script to follow 1000 users on my niche every day. I find that around 15% of users follow me back. In the next couple of days, I remove the res
by HowardRoark 16y ago
I have written a script to follow 1000 users on my niche every day. I find that around 15% of users follow me back. In the next couple of days, I remove the rest 85%. I have been doing this for a few months now and I have a few thousand followers on a few twitter accounts.
I have set up websites for each of those niches and get decent amount of traffic though twitter.
Been banned the first few times, but I have found my ways around it (mostly).
- drp 16y agoPlease stop doing that. It's bad for the world.
- akadruid 16y agoPlease stop caring. Its bad for your blood pressure. Seriously, it's only Twitter. Conflict, famine, and poverty are bad for the world, but Twitter doesn't matter.
- apphacker 16y agoI disagree with the "it's only Twitter" because Twitter is becoming increasingly important to me, but yeah, not worth getting angry about. At least that's what I tell myself.
- jrockway 16y agoDestroying communities for your own personal gain is a problem that extends much beyond Twitter.
- akadruid 16y agoTwitter is not a community. Twitter is a tool. A community can use Twitter, but I think describing spamming Twitter as destroying a community is disingenuous. The success of email, usenet and blogs/microblogs etc depend on their openness and easy access to all. Which also means people can and will spam them. So spam on twitter should be seen as a natural and nessecary side-effect, not the end of twitter. Berating the spammers will only increase your blood pressure - the spammers, tweeters and Twitter itself will continue as always.
- simonw 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- aditya 16y agoWhy? If they are providing actual value, and people care enough to follow them back - where's the bad for the world part? Unless it's just selling vi4gr4, then perhaps. But they're not actively spamming people (unless they follow them back, in which case they opted in.) I'd actually love being marketed to this way, and I think it is a viable way of allowing the marketing you want into your life. As opposed to "hot girls are waiting for you on Zoosk"
- axod 16y agoHey! Viagra makes life worth living for a lot of people... so I've heard.
- HowardRoark 16y agoInstead of manually finding interesting people on my niche, I set my criteria and let my program do the dirty work for me. What's wrong with it? I don't even spam people. I send one link to my site per every 5 witty and inspirational quotes. A few people that I met over there have contributed to my site as guest bloggers. I am not doing anything evil - just automating something that I would hate to do manually.
- swombat 16y agoYou're a waste of space. I hope your accounts all get suspended. Witty and inspirational quotes? Wow, I guess your followers should feel blessed to find themselves at the receiving end of your awesome RSS'ed wisdom. Spammers like you end up making people judge Twitter as "more spam" and giving it up before they've really tried it properly. Your followers are probably more likely than normal users to give up Twitter because it's just pointless noise. Simple utilitarian argument against what you're doing: if 10% of the Twitter population did what you do, Twitter would become mostly useless. I really hope they write scripts to detect and ban you.
- akadien 16y agoFor the sake of pointing out the obvious, Twitter already is mostly useless. Anything the previous poster can do to destroy the remainder, I'm all in favor of.
- daleharvey 16y agoyou are in favour of startups being actively ruined because you dont personally find them useful?
- akadien 16y agoIn general, no.
- axod 16y agoYou should be angry at twitter. They have made a spammers paradise. Any blame should rest with them IMHO.
- jarek 16y agoIncidentally, the 15% that follow you back are the ones you are least likely to engage in any meaningful manner beyond "click this link plz."
- imack 16y agoI've often wondered how much influence one really gains doing the follow/unfollow method. I mean, I suspect most of these types are just "social media coaches" following other "social media coaches". I suspect most accounts that have roughly the same number of followers and following above 500 are like this. I'd be interested in seeing a CTR for links published like this (though, not so interested that I'd do this scummy thing). Really if you're following over a thousand people, are you really paying attention to any?
- blizkreeg 16y agoLOL @ "social media coaches" following other "social media coaches". Loved it.
- Tichy 16y agoWell if they always do as told, they are the perfect clients. "Now buy this thing, plz".
- jarek 16y agoUnfortunately, "click this link plz" is more often a result of a five second attention span, and it takes longer than that to take out a credit card.
- jorgecastillo 16y agoThis is very annoying. If I didn't knew some one and he/she was following me I just blocked them. I just left Twitter some time ago (feeds are better) and I am glad I did.
- swombat 16y agoPeople like you should be banned from Twitter until you learn to behave better.
- rythie 16y agoI quite often block people for spam who do that
- jacquesm 16y agoMan that HN etiquette can feel limiting at times.
- ohashi 16y agoYou're not the first or last, I know I used scripts like this in the past (smaller scale). There were even services built around it back a while ago... the names elude me but they offered 10 or 20 new followers per day based on keyword. It was a good way to add relevant people as you used it. FYI: twitter did fix this problem somewhat. After 2000 following you need to have a ratio within 10%. So following 2001 (or was it 2002) requires 1800 followers. This strategy only works for the first 2000. Presumably, he's got to clean up quite a few times before breaking past this, an easier solution would be drop it down to 1000 or even 500, something no normal person would add in a day (but even I have found cases where I add more than this in a day legitimately - within a small niche I do business, to add everyone relevant it's around 700-900 I think). Finally, how do you find the traffic quality? From what I've seen it's crap. I've pushed ~1 million clicks in the last 2 months or so and it's pretty worthless in my experience. I think are a lot of bots and stat services just hitting it, definitely not real traffic.
- ErrantX 16y agoPlease feel free to post your Twitter account here so we can, um, "follow" you ;)