If you’re on Twitter, chances are, something similar has happened to you. . .
You receive a notification that you have a new follower. You view this person’s Twitter account and see that he/she has 4-5x as many followers as they are following. In other words, 20,000 people follow this person’s Twitter account yet he/she is only following 4,000 people. A few initial thoughts may pop into your head:
- Wow, this person must be really popular – look how many followers they have!
- Wow, this person must be really exclusive – he/she doesn’t follow too many people back!
- Wow, what am I tweeting about to catch such a popular and exclusive Twitter user’s eye?
If you’ve been on Twitter long enough, chances are you no longer have those thoughts but view your latest follower with a somewhat more suspicious and skeptical eye. Chances are, someone with such a large follower:following ratio is only adding you to pad his/her numbers. Chances are, someone like that will unfollow you within a few days or weeks.
How do I know? I check my account regularly using a free app called SocialBro. I run the app a few times each week and it lets me know who my recent unfollows are. When I view their profile summary in the app, I can see how recently they added me and visa-versa. I’d estimate that 95% of the time, my unfollows are people I never followed-back for various reasons. The other 5% are from “Twitter Players” – those who clearly view Twitter as a numbers game and put quantity ahead of quality. Apparently, they never read my post on why quality is more important than quantity when it comes to social media. When this happens, I immediately unfollow “the Player.”
If you’re not familiar with SocialBro, I’d encourage you to check it out. As a “research guy” I find a lot of their analytics, trending and filtering interesting. How about you? Do you watch your Twitter account that closely? What apps do you use to monitor your account?
Arthur Catalanello Consulting 
Arthur,
I haven’t used SocialBro, but I will definitely give it a try. One thing that I notice a lot is that I sometimes receive a follow from someone that doesn’t particularly interest me, and so I don’t follow them back. Then, a few days later, I will get yet another follow notification from the same individual. Sometimes I notice this happen upwards of five times!
Obviously, these people want to pad their followers number so much that they unfollow me simply so they can follow me again the next day and receive face-time and my attention. For their sake, I hope they at least have some software that does it for them!
Jim Mignano
http://www.MillennialsMarketing.com
Hi Jim,
Thanks for commenting on the post. I get that too – people who follow me on Twitter and if I don’t follow back within a day or two, they unfollow. If someone has interesting tweets and appears to be legit, I’ll follow them back. I’m not one to automatically follow people back. Good to see you last night at Social Media Club of Rochester!
Kind regards,
Arthur
Hi Arthur
I’ve noticed this happen to me on a number of occasions and didn’t really understand what was going on, now I do so thanks and I’ll look at this SocialBro app.
Hi Graham,
Thanks for reading my post and commenting. I called someone out last week for being a Twitter Player and he couldn’t/didn’t deny it. 🙂 SocialBro is pretty easy to use, but let me know if you have any questions. Hope you’re well my friend.
–Arthur
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