Update: TweetAdder made a major change with the following and unfollowing of users to comply with Twitter’s Terms of Service. It’s still a great tool and will save a ton of time building your twitter audience. Click here for some additional information about the update. Also, check out my final post for April: How I got 2000 Twitter Followers in 30 days.
In my last video, I mentioned that I automate following and unfollowing users – but don’t automatically follow back everyone that follows me. Someone posed the question: Isn’t auto-follow a good thing for building your follower list?
No. It may make your account look like it has more followers, but in reality it’s crap. If you auto follow, you get fake accounts that will not help you sell even 1 additional book. I don’t need those kinds of followers (the fake robot kind) and you don’t either. Once every couple days, just go through the follow list and look at the accounts. If they legitimately look like real people and potential readers – feel free to follow them back!
The bigger point here is that having an account filled with garbage isn’t going to help you sell more books. We want to avoid fake followers! These are some of the profiles I’m not following back (I’ve removed usernames and sales links – if you’re curious, just look at my followers list on twitter):
- I will show you how to get 20000 followers. no password. find the secret.
- you can get thousands followers after visit this website,,
- i can help you guys to adding your followers up to thousands people each day, more details
- we could add up to thousands Twitter Followers for your account, interested? Click here
- Do you interested for having thousands followers today? Very Cheap,,only $2,7 per 1k followers
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- What do you feel if get 1,000 followers today?? This website can help you for get it, see here
- Buy Twitter Foll0wers now, WITHOUT PASSWORD AND CHEAP PRICE. 20,000 ONLY $50.
and many others. It goes without saying that these services could get your account banned…and won’t help you sell any books.
I also received this mention:
- Follow back – 150,000 book readers/buyers over here. Does Twitter Sell Books? Publishers Say Yes
with a link to a site that sells authors 1 to 3 tweets about their book a day for a month to their 150,000 subscribers for $75 to $150. Does that sound like a good marketing deal? I like good marketing opportunities, so I ran the account through this Fake Follower tool: http://www.socialbakers.com/twitter/fakefollowercheck/
Update: Since this article was published, the link account mentioned above had their “fake followers” perform several actions to get them off of the social baker fake follower list… probably looking at the methodology they use: http://www.socialbakers.com/twitter/fakefollowercheck/methodology/ — So please! at the very least look at a few of their “followers” before investing any hard earned dollars.
And wouldn’t you know it: 95% of the followers were fake and 2% are inactive. At best, only 3% of the followers are real and sadly, I think many are follow back accounts and authors that didn’t realize they were being scammed. With “non-targeted” users (followers not in your genre), you’d be lucky to get even a single sale out of the rest of the users.
Sorry for the sidetrack, but as an author – you want to avoid fake, garbage accounts. If your goal is to sell more books, stick with real people and try to find real accounts/potential readers in your genre.