twitter fail blog

…there is only follow and not follow. Even so, there are people who just can’t make up their mind.

When both Thubten Comerford and Chris Husong followed us again, we thought we’d check and see who else couldn’t commit to following us full-time. We found lots of two-timers, hat tricks, quartets and quintuples (okay, what would you call them??) so we thought we’d just give you a lineup of the ones who are the most prolific in the follow/unfollow/refollow game.

@ericleebow starts off our list with 7 follows, and is joined by @mcfixit:

Slightly more ambitious: @BstTwt, and @pattishock have each followed us 8 times. Perhaps decision-making isn’t their strong suit.

The highest achievement award for #followerwhoring goes to @SteveKayser, who makes all the other contenders look like slackers by following us a total of 15 times.

Why would people waste their time following and unfollowing so much? Don’t be silly, they aren’t doing it themselves. They have a bot doing the heavy lifting for them. If you check the twitter page of each of these users, you’ll see they either follow and are followed by a ton of people, or have lots more followers than they are following. The use the bot to follow people just so they can grow their follower numbers when those people auto-follow them back. And when people don’t follow them, they unfollow and move on to the next sucker. But these bots are pretty stupid, like some people we know (Hi Marcia!), so they end up following a bunch of people again and again because they can’t remember where they’ve been.

This is a popular activity for “social media experts/strategists/mavericks/consultants/marketer/gurus” because big numbers of followers gives the appearance of influence and authority to people who don’t know any better.

It’s much easier for these posers to use a robot to get mindless followers who don’t care what they have to say than to suffer under the weight of actually being interesting and providing valuable content. The end result is no different than whispering to a packed auditorium. A few people may hear what you have to say. The rest won’t even notice you’re on the stage.

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