If you’ve been on Twitter for a while you’ve probably seen some unexplained follower activity. See if this sounds familiar: Some unheard of company or marketer starts following you. You think wow they have 40,000 followers they must be really important or how could they get that many followers. Soon you see many more people following you each with thousands of followers. Then you start to think why are these people following me? Maybe they saw my last tweet? Wow, maybe I am a big deal.
Well, you’re last tweet may have been good but, that’s not what’s happening here. This is the work of “Twitter Bots”. A Twitter Bot (or robot) is an automated program that scours Twitter looking for accounts to follow.
Why would anyone do that?
The main reason is that some marketers view Twitter a strictly a numbers game. The more followers the more people they can blast their “message” to. Twitter has imposed limits so people can’t follow 1000’s of accounts without people following them back. Essentially everyone can follow 2000 people but, after that you need to get more people to follow you before you can follow more people (e.g. the game). Some people call the state where you can’t follow more people as Twitter Jail.
To break it down here’s how the bots generally work:
- Follow as many people as you can (up to the Twitter limitation)
- Wait some time (maybe a few days or a week)
- Un-follow every account that hasn’t followed back
- Repeat
Here are some quick indicators that someone following you may be running a bot:
- Little or no tweets.
- Same tweets over and over (aka. Twitter Vomit)
- Obscure or no bio
- No profile picture (e.g. The twitter egg)
- Account is following 100’s or 1000’s of accounts but, has few followers (note: their few followers are probably bots also)
- Over 2000 followers and around equal numbers of following / followers. Note: There are exceptions to this.
- You were followed by lots of people around the same time in volume that is unusual for your account. Paid bots are often at work for multiple accounts.
So what to do?
Don’t play the game. Don’t follow people unless you are really interested in what they are saying. There are so many really interesting people on twitter to follow, just look for more with the many twitter tools available.
