Ashton Kutcher is about to pass 1,000,000 followers on Twitter.
I'm happy for Ashton. And I mean that. He plans to do some great things with the account and I hope he does. But you're not Ashton Kutcher and neither am I. Unfortunately there are a whole slew of Twitter geniuses out there encouraging you to focus almost exclusively on getting as many followers as possible. It's fools gold. And I'm about to illustrate why.
Getting followers is easy. Building a community is hard.
A phone call with Jim Marks about creating some fake accounts (an entirely different post) prompted me to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time. People ask me constantly, "How do people get all of those followers on Twitter?" To which I always answer, "if all you want is followers, I can get you 10,000 followers easy. Building a community is hard."
I created two fake Twitter accounts.
@jwmont and @holachick are not real. Furthermore, 99% of their tweets were randomly generated.
I set both of these accounts up last Thursday. It took all of about 30 minutes to make up profile information and populate Twitterfeed.com with the RSS feeds that generated the random tweets to their accounts. @jwmont was set up to focus on iPhone twitter search results and @holachick was set up to focus on affiliiate marketing twitter search results.
So, how did I get 2900 and 2500 people to follow accounts that were just a series of randomly generated status updates in less than a week? Click here to learn how I got thousands to follow two fake twitter accounts and why you should ignore Twitter follower numbers.
Comments (123)Subscribe to CommentsComment