How I Became a Spammer

I decided to get more serious about Twitter. Since I've been playing around with my branding and Web 2.0 marketing ideas, I thought it would be a good idea to build up a strong following.

If you perform a Google search for "how to get more followers on twitter", you'll find a long list of options. I clicked on the first 20 results and began to explore. After a quick review of all of them, I decided to try Twiends and TweetAdder. Here's what happened.


Twiends is an interesting program that gives you virtual credits for following other users, and pays virtual credits when other users follow you. This was extremely effective. For every person you follow on Twiends, you get a follower. That's a great ratio, considering that the industry average is about 33% (for every 3 people you add, 1 follows you back).

TweetAdder costs money, but is very professional (I'm using the trial version). It takes more of the spam approach - add as many people as Twitter will allow you in one day, analyze who is following you back, automatically unfollow those who aren't following you. There's a lot of powerful functionality here. I'll definitely be exploring this more.

So what results did I see? I started last night with 68 followers. As of this post, I have 253 followers. By spending a few hours researching and adding, I gained 185 followers in one night.

I'm going to continue aggressively using these tools for a week or so, until I get 1,100 followers. At that point, I'll clean up my following list (which will likely cause me to lose followers) and continue spreading content. This is a fun little experiment.