Buy Twitter Followers - Good Idea, Waste of Time or Just Plain Dangerous?

I recently decided to buy Twitter followers from a service so thought it worth letting you know how it works and what I found out. Here is my Hype140 review...

Firstly we all know that the main thing you need to do to increase your Twitter followers in a high-quality way is to concentrate on your own tweets. Put together a strategy - what are you going to tweet about and when - then concentrate on saying the right things. Useful, interesting and amusing tweets that offer some value to your users will make people follow you and stick with you. It will also help to gain more followers as they are more likely to retweet what you say.

Following people who are relevant using one of the many tools that are available is a good plan, but it takes time as you need to continually manage the process. To do it manually you really need to check every person's tweets - how relevant and active are they and what quality do they offer? You also need to remove those who don't follow you back.

Next step is to get added to relevant lists and to build relationships with influential people in your space. Again this takes time...

So, given my lack of time, I thought I would be better off concentrating on tweeting as opposed to trying to build my followers. This is where Hype140 came in - I decided to buy Twitter followers...

I had two main concerns with this: would Twitter suspend me for using such tactics and would the quality of the followers be poor. The price looked great, but they might not even be real people for all I knew...

So I tried to get under the skin of what was on offer... Firstly when you buy Twitter followers from Hype140.com they ask you for your username and password, but they do not touch your Twitter profile and they don't send out tweets or DMs from the accounts they work for. They only need your username and password so they can follow people on your behalf and so they can clean up the account when they are done (by removing those who have not followed back).

They use three tactics:

- they send tweets and DMs from their accounts asking people to follow you. These tweets are often retweeted. They also mention your account on several blogs and websites to tell people to follow you.

- they follow more people on your behalf - targeting those people who are known to be likely to follow-back.

- they try to get you known by people who are building lists that are relevant to you. This means they are influential in your space and getting listed on their lists means you are more likely to be seen by other relevant people.

The thing is, I made the smallest purchase I was allowed to buy: 1,000 followers. This made me think about what would happen. Presumably if I had bought 50,000 the above three tactics would all come into play, but an order of 1,000 would be more likely to use the first two of the above tactics and less of the third and I would imagine that the third tactic is the one where the best quality followers can be found.

The amount of lists I found myself on grew quickly as did the amount of followers, so job done. But some of the lists were called "who I recently followed", "follow these", "follow back" making me think that the 1,000 followers I had bought might just be habitual followers. If that's the case they are little value and they might not even follow for long. And I'm sure they will unfollow me the second I unfollow them...

On the plus side, I bought 1,000 followers but over 1,500 were delivered, and this tactic undoubtedly makes me look more popular so it might prove to be the catalyst for future organic growth.

One other thing that would be of real use is if you could target people based on their geographic location. I'm mainly interested in UK consumers but I might have just bought 1,000 followers from the US and other countries.

Final thought is that I'm planning a test. I've bought two lots of 1,000 followers from two different accounts about very different subject matters and I'm planning to download the followers to see what percentage are the same people. The amount of followers I have in each account is still pretty low, so the duplicates are likely to be low-quality habitual followers I think. Hypothesis to be proved...

The Hype140 service does exactly what they say it will do. They quickly delivered what I had bought and nothing bad happened. I also like the fact they promote themselves in an innovative way - as an online marketer I appreciate clever methods of promotion and don't mind admitting that this article if part of their clever marketing tactics. They have offered me some free followers in return for writing an honest Hype140 review and they made it clear that they would "pay up" even if the review was unfavourable. I like the honesty of this as a marketing tactic - and undoubtedly it will help them to grow as a business, proving they know a bit about promotion...

Google - An Introduction

Where better to start than to talk about the services that Google offer? I won't go into them all now as there are a lot and the list is growing all of the time. I'll talk about some of their specific services in more depth later on, and I'll also post when something new appears from Google that might be of interest to small businesses. Let's start with the basics for now...

In the old days Google's two main products were Adwords and Adsense:

Adwords
Adwords allows advertisers to promote their websites in an extremely cost-effective way by displaying small text ads against specific search-phrases on Google and next to relevant content on other sites. Advertisers pay on a cost-per-click basis and the price paid is dependent on the competitiveness of the search phrases that you choose. You can limit the maximum you are prepared to pay per-click and the maximum you are prepared to spend per day so it can suit even the smallest budgets. The system takes some learning if you are new to it, but they have oodles of help pages to walk you through it if you want to do it yourself. Alternatively you could use the services of a Google Adwords Professional (a "GAP"), a group of Google qualified Adwords specialists (of which I am one). A GAP should know how best to organise your Adwords account to optimise activity including budgets, reach and Return on Investment. Adwords can generate a lot of very profitable sales, depending on the business you are in, and when that happens people tend to want to spend a lot of money on advertising more which is why Google generates so much advertising revenue. It works. Extremely well.

Adsense
Adsense is a system that allows website owners to monetise their visitors by displaying Adwords ads next to their own content. The ads are relevent to the content on the site so they are more likely to be of interest to their users and hence they are responsive and produce good results. When set up, this can provide a steady income as Google shares the ad revenue with you, the publisher. Obviously the amount you earn it depends on many factors, most notably the amount of traffic you have and the industry that you are in.

These two products offer two opportunities to small businesses...

If you sell anything online, Adwords is certainly for you. And if you don't it is probably still for you as it is one of the most qualified and low-cost ways of promoting your website and brining in new visitors.

If you have a website with a lot of content and visitors, Adsense can generate you income. There are other ways to do this (e.g. affiliate schemes, advertising, sponsorship, etc.) and what works best for you is a question of economics - which brings in more money per visitor - and that means testing or running more than one strategy simultaneously.

Small Business Internet Marketing (or SBIM) Blog - Introduction

Welcome to my blog. Very simply it aims to help Small Businesses market themselves online by giving you insightful ideas, tools and techniques that should help you to use online effectively without breaking the bank.

I should firstly introduce myself...

I have worked in online and ecommerce marketing since the mid-90's and started up a successful online marketing agency in the UK in 2001 which now looks after some leading brand-name clients.

As a small businessman myself, and having grown up with a family small business, I fully understand what makes them tick. My agency, like other agencies, needs to charge day-rates in order to succeed in the market-place, and they can be off-putting to the small businessman with limited budget. But many of the tools and techniques we use are as relevant to a one-man business as they are to a well-known brand name.

This blog was my answer; to explain some of the tools and techniques I use on a day to day basis with the aim of helping small businesses to market themselves online. I plan to help you to prioritise and to get higher-value from your marketing efforts whilst saving you time and without it costing a fortune.

I'll be covering areas such as website build, search marketing (search engine optimisation and pay per click, including local search), email marketing, advertising, website analytics/tracking, etc.

Please let me know if there is something in particular you would like me to cover...