First 500 Twitter Followers....

[JohnW-UK]

I am about to start a brand new twitter account... I have been reading about people offering to set-up accounts with 500 followers... I assume these are spammy/fake profiles.

I was thinking of looking into twellow.com or twiends.com. Any experience with these? How do you get your first 500 followers?

Also any other ideas? AND Does the follow back model work i.e. you follow me and I follow you.... I would of thought healthy twitter accounts for more followers than people you are following.... Discuss...

[William.Lau]

A lot of people misinterpret social media. You end up with more spam than anything else using the above services.

Some are legitimate but majority are just spam. The main reason behind this is because the insights and stats from your social media accounts will be inaccurate and hinders your future goals and tasks.

Lets say I get 10000 followers and 100 of those are actual followers that liked my page from a post or my website. If I am only getting 25 followers to click my links on Twitter, 25/10000 seems like crap. But 25/100 is pretty good. We are given these numbers, but using places like Twiends and buying followers are just not helpful and ruins your stats and analytics.

[JohnW-UK]

Yeah thats kind of my thinking.... Might just hashtag trends....

[MattAntonino]

I found a couple of SEO & digital marketing lists and followed people I was interested in.  Now I use Twitter as an information source so I follow a lot more.  Some follow back.  Others follow from your site, your social media profiles, sites like XeeMe and wherever you're linked.

Create content, the rest follows.  Same as everywhere.

[JohnW-UK]

I find myself explaining why not to pay $25 for 1000 followers. Clients view is that it makes the account look better and if they get taken in the future they have made the account look better in the short term..... How do you defend that sort of logic....

[SEOAndy]

SEOMoz recently introduced Followerwonk. It's a really good tool to decide who are influencers in the sector you are in and makes it easy to follow them and find people worth following to build your twitter profile. You can also search twitter bios to follow people with the same interests. For example I was setting up an account for a new fashion website and searched bios with "Fashion, Online Shopping and Shopaholic" and the results were really good.

From there it's all about creating good content that people will want to read / retweet etc... and then the followers will flow

[AndrusPurde]

Many good points already made. I would just add that getting to first 500 followers, using 'organic' methods like following influencers, sharing their content and producing own content is easy and doesn't take too long. Plus you'll learn a great deal about the market in the process.

And somehow, it also feels wrong to pay for zero-value-add things like fake Twitter accounts, this just feeds the monster.

[JohnW-UK]

As I said in my earlier comment..... How do you stop clients paying for cheap follows.... my original comment above is....

"...I find myself explaining why not to pay $25 for 1000 followers. Clients view is that it makes the account look better and if they get taken in the future they have made the account look better in the short term..... How do you defend that sort of logic...."

[AndrusPurde]

Gotcha. I would just state the same arguments, that building 500 followers oneself is a worthwhile excercise, doesn't take that long and there's no "feeding the spam monster".

[JohnW-UK]

It's trying to example why fake profiles/spam are bad.... they just see the numbers of followers going up and think it makes the account look better....