Okay, let’s think about this. Ms. Azad is offering to SELL me 10,000 Twitter followers? Um, then why does she only have 596 followers? If she knows, or can control a huge block of Twitter bots to follow paying customers, why wouldn’t she save her self some time and do this spammy recruiting from an account with 100,000 followers or so?

One reason is, when a certain number of Tweeters REPORT and BLOCK Ms. Azad this account will be dead and she will have to make a new one. A new one takes about 30 seconds to create. And following 800 unsuspecting noobs on Twitter, a few more minutes.

Question: How fast can you click a follow button 800 times? There are people in foreign countries who are getting paid poorly to do just that.

So the attractive Ms. Azad is a spammer. She’s trying to get your money and sell you a stream of zombie Twitter accounts to follow you or your business. I guess it would look good on your resume to have 12,000 Twitter followers. "Wow, this guy must really know social media."

BUT it doesn’t and it won’t and you shouldn’t.

1. Fake followers are easy to spot. A huge number of fake followers will get your account banned.

2. Fake followers do not increase your engagement. A zombie follower does increase your number by 1. However the real measure of Twitter is how influencial your tweets are. If you tweet to 10,000 zombie following accounts. Guess how many of them are going to visit your link or retweet your tweet? ZERO. Because they are not there. There is no one behind the follow.

3. Giving any financial information to spammers opens your information up to a lot more incidious scams than selling you Twitter followers. Think identity theft, bogus charges, and global distribution of your credit card numbers. All, bad consequences.

So what you do, when you see these types of accounts in your followers: REPORT and BLOCK them. It will flag them to Twitter that they might be potential spammers. It will remove them from your followers, reducing your number by 1. (frown) But maybe, Ms. Azad will be slowed down from spamming the next unsuspecting Twitter user.

Twitter is great. It’s also full of scams and spammers. Don’t feed them. Report them.

You can download this presentation from Slideshare.net: Buy Twitter Followers: The Bad & Ugly Truth

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: http://uber.la/2013/03/buy-twitter-followers/

Get all the Twitter Tips you need on the Twitter Way page.

More social media marketing tips:

• Facebook’s "Mostly Just Friends" Filtering Is Selling You Not Helping You, Facebook Fail #30
• Hello Twitter, It’s Me Again: Locked Out of My Primary & Essential Twitter Account
• Tethered by Tech: How Things Fail and Theoretical Speed Remains Theoretical
• PAY ATTENTION: 1. What have you been asked to do? 2. Do that. 3. Forget everything else.
• First Responder, Gets the Work; Resist the Urge, Pause, Breathe
• Google Page Rank: What You Know and Don’t Know Can Hurt Your Business
• Collecting Energy: Are You a Collector, Generator, or User

Check out the Strategist’s Notebook page and these other posts about online marketing:

• Workin Facebook < all the Facebook Posts in one place
• uber.la quickies < a streamlined takeaway from today’s best marketing sources
• Social Media University < 2 minute educational videos
• Social Business MBA < the reading list
• Becoming a Social Media Rockstar: The Quick Path < um… let’s discuss

Let me help you jumpstart your social marketing:

FluentSocial (Social Media Marketing)

FluentSearch (SEO, Google Adwords)

Most people don’t really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can’t help it. (from Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement)