Waggener Edstrom Worldwide

After hearing an interesting story on NPR about buying twitter followers earlier this month, I was totally intrigued. Did the work? Was it effective? Or a total sham? I thought we should give it a try, just to see.  Here’s what happened….

THE EXPERIMENT
I rallied my team to conduct an experiment using a brand new (zero followers), unaffiliated-to-the-agency, twitter handle: @PortlandFlea (a co-worker’s side project). We spent $34.97 to purchase 1,000 targeted Twitter followers for the @PortlandFlea account from Twitter1k.

THE RESULTS

• Numbers do not equate to influence. We’ve been saying this for a long time and this experiment is just more proof. If you are trying to follow as many people as possible as fast as possible and you don’t care where they are and what they are interested in, buying followers IS a good tactic for you. However, if you are looking to target a specific audience in a specific region or on a specific topic this is NOT a good tactic. Given the fine-tuned comms strategies we hang our hat on, this is not something we see the agency facilitating on behalf of our clients.
• Key words matter….kind of: We thought we might get more for our money by paying a little bit extra to get targeted followers. This only sort of worked. We started the process with “Portland, flea market, vintage and deals.” Specifically “deals” was bringing in some wonky followers. Think coupon, fast cash now types: @LouivillCoupons, @ChicagoIllinois (Chicago Bargains) and @AmarilloPromos. We switched “deals” to “antiques” about half way through and it seemed to narrow the focus a tiny bit. However, only about one in 10 people following Portland Flea have some connection to our key words (albeit remote in many cases).
• Held hostage: For 14 days they ask you to give up control of your Twitter-following activities. You give up your password and each day you are following as little as 900 people or as many as 3,000. This changes minute by minute. You can’t follow your own people because at the end of the 14 days they “supposedly” unfollow everyone their bots have followed (except they don’t). And you spend every day checking to see if followers have gone back to zero. You could just change your password, but then you are stuck with manually unfollowing thousands of handles that have nothing to do with your feed– these are literally the three at the top of the Portland Flea feed: @YLParksandRec (YorbaLinda Parks&Rec); @a3atka (Азат Хайбулов); @koreapharm. You can still tweet but for a fledgling account like @PortlandFlea, not being able to follow real accounts for fear they would get whipped back to zero really hamstrung the account.
• Support: I interacted with Twitter1k’s support team twice during this experiment. While they did respond both times, first with an automated request that didn’t answer my questions, followed by a real person a few days later that actually did. When I contacted them after 14 days when we had not reached the 1000 mark, they did quickly refund my money, but conveniently ignored my question about returning the number of accounts followed back to zero. Considering how shady the purchasing process was, the customer service was better than I expected but still not great. And as outlined above, now Kate will likely have to manually unfollow thousands of accounts to get back to where we started.
• If we are digging for positives: Would not recommend this for a client BUT you could look at it this way: @PortlandFlea now has close to 1,400 Twitter followers in less than a month. If you are looking to pad your account with sheer numbers, 1,000 followers for $34.97 isn’t a bad deal. And at a glance, it looks like @PortlandFlea is putting out something that people want to hear! Of course the flip side is that if people look to close, we lose all credibility. It’s not hard to see that these people are completely irrelevant to the conversation and it is frankly embarrassing.

So in the end, the lesson that we continue to learn about social media applies here: while this may be a brave, new medium, the basics of good PR still apply. There are no short cuts.

P.S. If you are interested the first-ever, Portland Flea is Saturday, September 17th for those of you in Portland. More info can be found on the Facebook page.