The Dirty Truth About Clearing 500 Followers on Twitter

Published by Toronto Mike on June 17, 2009 @ 13:45 in Twitter

twitterI got to 500 followers on Twitter fairly honestly. Some follow everyone under the sun in the hopes they'll reciprocate. In fact, there are even lists of people on Twitter who automatically follow back everyone, so if you follow 500 of those guys you'll hit 500 followers pretty quick. I only follow people on Twitter I actually want to follow, and right now that's 134 people.

I hit 500 followers at some point last week. I only really got into Twitter this past February, so most of my 500+ followers came on board since then. Unfortunately, there's a dirty factoid about one's Twitter follower count that tarnishes the whole thing.

A good number of Twitter followers are pr / marketing / spammy accounts. Someone is selling something or some service, and they create a Twitter account to market their product and/or service. Then, they follow everyone under the sun, in the hopes you'll reciprocate. I never reciprocate, but I don't do anything to block them from following me, either. So my Twitter follower number appears to exceed 500, but the number of actual people reading my tweets is most definitely less than that.

It's the dirty truth about Twitter followers. And the more Twitter followers you have, the more pr / marketing / spammy accounts you'll have following you. The cosmic Twitter ballet, continues...

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P.S. Follow me on Twitter. If you have an account, follow me at http://twitter.com/torontomike.

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9 Responses to "The Dirty Truth About Clearing 500 Followers on Twitter"

PhotoScanning.ca
June 17, 2009 / 15:16

I find twitter clears through mine pretty quickly... i.e. I'll go down followers some days as they are clearing out the spammers. So you never know, you might log in one day with 250!

You got one set of eyes right here though!

Down Goes Brown
June 17, 2009 / 15:20

If you take out all the fake hockey accounts, your number is more like 125.

Mike from Lowville
June 17, 2009 / 15:27

I'm a Twit and follow few. Still can't quite get into it.

Roshan
June 18, 2009 / 10:07

I made the mistake of joining a site that re-tweets ur messages in ur own account (you have to give ur user id & password). Big mistake, so I've unsubscribed from it.

The_Voice
June 18, 2009 / 10:43

AHA! The spammers are following you! I still have a chance! (Except for the spammers following me...)

Jill
June 18, 2009 / 15:37

Why do followers that are spammers still stay listed as follwers if you are not following them and you block them? Do they still have access to your tweets?

Toronto Mike
June 18, 2009 / 15:53

If you block them, I believe they are no longer following you.

Do you have followers you blocked?

Jill
June 18, 2009 / 15:55

Yes, about half a dozen.

Steve
July 27, 2009 / 13:42

Maybe I'm missing something,but why would anybody who already has a place to write, like a blog for instance, want a twitter to begin with? When you have the ability to quickly post things that can be as long or short as you want them to be, why limit yourself to some stupid character limit? Seems like a lame waste of time to me. I realize that some people use them to promote their blog posts and such, but I have to wonder how well it actually works. I mean if somebody cares about you enough to follow you on Twitter, wouldn't there be a pretty good chance they're already looking at your website?

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