Should You Buy Twitter Followers?

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A Google search of “buy Twitter followers” will lead you to pages full of services that allow you to buy as many Twitter followers as you want.

But is it a good idea for a business to be buying Twitter followers?

There are a lot of reasons why you probably should stay away from buying Twitter followers, but one of the main ones is that the algorithms always seem to catch up to this kind of activity. What this means is that Twitter will eventually be able to figure out that you aren't growing your Twitter following naturally and can limit the number of people your Tweets reach or even shut down your account for violating their terms of service.

Search engines and social media platforms want you to provide their users with really great content, so the users have a good experience. They also want you to grow your presence naturally and organically. Buying followers goes against both of these principles. So, while you may be able to get away with it for a while, buying Twitter followers is likely to eventually get your account downgraded or even terminated.

The only reason you'd want to buy Twitter followers may be to have what's referred to as "social proof", meaning if others see that a lot of people follow you then you can appear to be someone who is more popular and worth following as well. But ultimately you're better off having a smaller number of real people who have a real interest in your business and are more likely to engage with your brand.

Past Crackdowns on Buying Twitter Followers

In 2011, for instance, Google rolled out an update to stop people from gaming their system and thousands of marketers and business owners lost the rankings and the income from those rankings overnight. With many people losing many thousands of dollars a month.

Facebook over the last several years has downgraded the reach of “spammy” posts and accounts that have ‘fake’ followers.

Just this year, Twitter purged thousands and thousands of fake accounts across its platform in an effort to cut down on spam.

There are legitimate ways to do paid ads to grow your Twitter following, but the reality is that buying Twitter followers is just not a good long-term strategy, because eventually it’s likely to come back to haunt you in the form of a downgraded account and much lower reach.

What Do You Do to Gain a Great Twitter Presence Instead?

The answer to this is pretty straightforward—give your audience a great experience—but there are also some tricks and tips that can help you to gain lots of Twitter followers pretty fast.

Here are a few of the best ways to grow your Twitter following:

Follow people on a regular basis. 

This one is pretty basic, but it’s also really important. When you follow people they’ll often follow you back. So make sure that you’re following people that might have an interest in your product or services and also follow other leaders within your vertical.

A great tip here is to go the the accounts of other products, services, and brands that are related to your business and follow their followers. These are the types of people you want following you as well.

Use a tool to schedule your Tweets. 

HootSuite is the gold standard for scheduling all kinds of social media posts and tweets. By using a tool like HootSuite, you can batch your work instead of having to post every two or three hours. This will save you a ton of time and allow you schedule your posts for the best time to post on Twitter.

Thee are plenty of other popular social media sharing tools out there as well, including Buffer, HubSpot, and CoSchedule.

Tweet with links attached and make the content valuable. 

Keep a running list of valuable content in your industry and tweet those links on a regular basis along with a very small piece of commentary. Tweets that have links in them get retweeted more often the ones that don’t. And don't forget to tweet links back to your own website as well.

Remember to optimize your bio. 

The biography is something that a lot of people seem to forget. So, it’s a great place to do just a bit of optimization. Make sure you use industry keywords in your bio so that people can find you.

And again, keep in mind you can include a clickable link back to your website as well.

Ask for retweets.

This is a really easy one and asking for retweets is currently still working. But Facebook had a crackdown on a similar strategy over the last couple of years where you asked for a like, comment, or share. So, I’m not sure how long this will work for, but it is working right now.

Upload your email contacts to Twitter.

If you have an email list, you can upload it to twitter and ask those people to follow you. Since they already know you and your brand, they’re more likely to follow you.

Use a picture of a real person—preferably you.

Here’s one that I see people make a mistake on quite often. Don’t use your logo on your Twitter account. Use a picture of yourself. Twitter is a pretty personal platform and people like to follow people and not companies. As a matter of fact many companies encourage their leaders to maintain a social media presence on Twitter to further peronalize the brand.

Overall, it’s a pretty bad idea for businesses to be buying Twitter followers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have an amazing twitter account with lots of followers that helps to raise awareness about your brand. You just have to make sure that you’re following the basic rules of providing a great user experience for the platform.