Twitter: augmenting your … er, fanbase

This is a couple of days old, but I’ve been doing Other Things and only just noticed this story.

The estimable Graham Cluley warns us to Beware shortcuts for getting more followers on Twitter. Like all of us whose job description includes blogging (not that I’ve seen Graham’s job description – call it an educated guess), he’s probably under pressure to get as many Likes, Shares, Follows and other nounified verbs as possible, since they’re considered ways of measuring blogging success, but his popularity is based on good blogging and hard work, not too-good-to-be-true shortcuts, and he clearly smelt a rat when he started seeing tweets offering a dubious way of increasing follower numbers on Twitter.

I can’t say I’ve noticed them, but apparently there are lots of Tweets around like this:

GET MORE FOLLOWERS MY BEST FRIENDS? I WILL FOLLOW
YOU BACK IF YOU FOLLOW ME - [LINK]

Graham explains in some detail the result of his investigations, and Twitter’s Rules and Best Practices page also lists some of the pitfalls that make this a Bad Idea. Well worth a read.

David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
Small Blue-Green World
ESET Senior Research Fellow