100 Twitter followers in 24 hours, just by following people

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895972

by matthodan • 15 years ago

8 12 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I created a Twitter account, followed 400 people, and got 100 followers in return. That's a 25% conversion rate-- maybe this is normal, but it seemed really high to me.

user242• 15 years ago

I used this exact tactic with http://twitter.com/u24_dailyquotes and now twitter won't allow me to follow anyone else, even if I unfollow some accounts. Be careful!

TMK2• 15 years ago

You can not have more than 10% more follows than followers after two thousand follows. This is so that this tactic wont be used too fast and the twitter bandwith wont be used so much for following.

user242• 15 years ago

I've got around 50% followers to follow ratio...

katherinehague• 15 years ago

It doesn't seem particularly high, but generally people fall off over time. However, I wouldn't actually recommend this tactic as a way of gaining followers.

1) Following too many people erodes the value of your Twitter stream, its better to be invested in the people you follow. You'll get a lot more out of the experience. 2) Your followers won't actually be as engaged as they would have been if they had found you though more organic growth. 3) I think people tend to judge accounts that are following way more people than follow them...but maybe that's just my own bias.

TMK2• 15 years ago

This tactic to gain twitter followers does work and there is even tools for making it easier. Just google twitter follower exchange or something and you will find them.

Though if you do use those tools, your twitter stream will be full of stuff you really might not want to read.

cgislason• 15 years ago

Seeing evidence of this trick is one criteria I use to block people and (possibly) report them for spam.

jvandenbroeck• 15 years ago

There are many programs around there that can do this automatically for you. But imo it is not a good idea, real people are much more interesting. I don't think you will achieve that much with a bunch of people that are not really interested in you & just follow you back.

_delirium• 15 years ago

I haven't had the patience to go that high (or bothered to script it), but I've gotten about halfway there before. Depending on what kind of profile it is, though, and what areas you're following people in, many of the follow-backs can be pretty low-quality. If you're in any neighborhood with lots of other people trying to optimize their twitter followers, you can get a bunch of auto-followbacks from people who don't ever read their twitter stream. Produces an interesting situation where there might be dozens of accounts all following each other but not reading each other, a fake attention economy with nobody paying attention. :) Perhaps as if magazines upped circulation by agreeing to buy copies of each others' magazines and then throw them away.

damoncali• 15 years ago

It's high. I've done it with results typically from 3 to 25%, depending on the demographics. Problem is that it doesn't really scale. Great to get a few hundred or thousand followers, but you aren't going to get to a million that way.

aorshan• 15 years ago

Well the question you should be asking is why you want all of those followers. If you are trying to get followers in order to promote content then just randomly following people is going to produce very low click through rates as the people are likely not interested in what you have to say.

However if you are trying to get a lot of followers to get paid to promote services, then that is the way to go.

fezzl• 15 years ago

It's pointless. We have more than a thousand Twitter followers, but they rarely ever click through on any of our content. The same content posted on Facebook yields very different results.

pasbesoin• 15 years ago

GIGO

100 Twitter followers in 24 hours, just by following people

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