Followers, followers, everything seems to be about followers on Twitter. Although that is wrong statement, since it is not about followers, but about the attention you are able to get from your followers. However there are quite some obscure pyramid schemes to get more followers on Twitter. Which, as every pyramid scheme, promise to most immense results: 20k followers in a day, 1k followers per day, the only thing you have to for it is… and so on. Since I am still interested in how Twitter can work better for me, I decided to give it go, not get the immense numbers, but to see how much value / attention you could get by these services.

Twitter train

I decided to use a service which called itself the Twitter train: ‘get onboard with the Twitter train’ was the fancy slogan. And onboard I went, I had to give them my username and password (sadly they did not had an Oauth implementation) and the next thing I had to do was first follow some VIP members (people who pay to be a member of this service and gain some privileges in that) and the next I had to do was to follow at least 20 other people that were already ‘on the train’. The first issue was already there for me: why would I want to follow these people while they do not add any value for me? I do not mind to follow 40 extra people, however I do mind to follow extra people that are only talking about medicines, mortgages and how you can mystically enlarge some parts of the male body. Alas, i was in this experiment, so I decided to go on with.

In the next few hours I got at least one hundred new followers, so the service did what it promised. However it did more: it tweeted on my behalf, every few hours some promotional tweet was send suggesting that all people should get on this Twitter train. They didn’t told me that before signing up. However, getting more and more followers every hour, it could be worth it. However there wasn’t really any normal new follower that I gained. Not a single one was looking for adding value to Twitter, they were al fixating at numbers or in selling meds, mortgages or some other obscure things.

I decided to remove myself from the service, since it didn’t add any value at all. However removing myself from it was hard to do. Even after I removed myself twice, the thing was still tweeting on my behalf. So I changed my password and that tweeting was solved.

Results

Yes my number of followers are increased, although I removed an awful lot of the new followers by blocking them, since they were not on Twitter to interact, to share or to do any other thing than just playing with numbers, or just selling their stuff. They were not doing things I thought off as valuable for me.

So is it worth to use these kind of services? No not at all, you have to follow random people, and random people follow you back. The value you get out of this is absolutely zero, yes the number of your followers will increase, however how much is that worth, if you cannot capture anyones attention and while you are spamming some kind of Twitter train site to your ‘normal’ followers.