Why buying Twitter followers is a really bad idea

Over the last few days, I have seen quite a few articles talking and giving details of people that seemingly have been purchasing Twitter followers. Here is an article by Gordon Macmillan aka @gordonmacmillan which gives details of Mark Clarke aka @mrmarkclarke and a few others who seemingly have suddenly had a huge groundswell of new followers literally overnight, there is also @nero who has written and outed, the social media man man at PayPal for seemingly buying followers, and then outed Azeem who is the CEO of PeerIndex for also buying Twitter followers and then finally because of him outing these people, suddenly found himself on the mysterious delivery of 40,000 new bogus followers to his account.

So, I wanted to give my view on this situation. Buying Twitter followers is a total and utter waste of money and may well lose you far more than the few dollars that it cost you. I am not going to highlight any of the companies that offer these services as I don’t want to give them more publicity, but a quick search on Google, eBay and Fiverr will reveal hundreds of offers to get you thousands of followers literally overnight.

The most important thing to remember is that Twitter is a public place. So when you suddenly get thousands and thousands of new followers, people will be nosey and think.. so who are all these new followers? and what will they find? They will find thousands and thousands of bogus Twitter accounts, accounts with no photos, no bio’s, no tweets, following the max of 2000 followers and usually overseas and often if they have tweeted its in a foreign language. But also, clicking on the bogus twitter accounts followers will be the list of all the other Twitter accounts that they have followed, thus making it really easy to see who else may well have paid for followers.

The other thing to bear in mind is that most of these accounts are bogus, Twitter will suspend them or remove them at some stage, so your follower numbers will invariably go backwards. These bogus accounts will never reply to you, engage with you, retweet you, refer or advocate for you and if you get ‘outed’ publicly that it looks like you have bought followers then quite frankly there goes all of your credibility that may well have taken you years to build up.

The funny thing though is that I may have just uncovered a new opportunity. Buying Twitter followers for others as a gift. When you buy Twitter followers, you simply pay, and then give the Twitter username. You do not have to give them your password. So a complete stranger can buy anyone Twitter followers if they wish as part of a smear campaign, for a joke, for xmas, for a birthday and so on…So for the record, I would never ever buy Twitter followers, and I would hope that you would never as well.

Please feel free to let me know what you think.. Have I got it wrong? Is there ever a good reason to buy Twitter followers?