Should Talk of the Sound Buy Twitter Followers?

Austin Considine has an interesting article in the New York Times: Buying Their Way to Twitter Fame:

It may be the worst-kept secret in the Twittersphere. That friend who brags about having 1,000, even 100,000 Twitter followers may not have earned them through hard work and social networking; he may have simply bought them on the black market.

And it’s not just ego-driven blogger types. Celebrities, politicians, start-ups, aspiring rock stars, reality show hopefuls — anyone who might benefit from having a larger social media footprint — are known to have bought large blocks of Twitter followers.

It is apparently easy and cheap to buy Twitter followers (about 1 penny each).

The article is driven by news accounts about a new service out of the UK from a company called StatusPeople which built a tool which it says can determine, with a high degree of accuracy, how many of a person’s Twitter followers are fake: Obama Has Millions of Fake Twitter Followers.

According to the StatusPeople tool, 71 percent of Lady Gaga’s nearly 29 million followers are “fake” or “inactive.” So are 70 percent of President Obama’s nearly 19 million followers.

Today, Talk of the Sound is following 231 accounts and has 468 followers. To the best of my knowledge they are real.

I am assiduously anti-fakeaccounts. I would never, ever buy followers. In fact, I actually go through my followers and purge them from time to time if I suspect an account is fake or otherwise not legitimate. I just did that a few days ago and blocked about 30 accounts. They were not “fake” accounts per se but they were not what I consider legitimate followers either. Many of them were real estate agents and other marketers who were following me in the hopes that I will return the favor.

Considine explains:

Twitter followers are sold in two ways: “Targeted” followers, as they are known in the industry, are harvested using software that seeks out Twitter users with similar interests and follows them, betting that many will return the favor. “Generated” followers are from Twitter accounts that are either inactive or created by spamming computers — often referred to as “bots.”

In those terms, I do not have any “generated” followers and I cull out what I suspect are “targeted” followers. I just want people who are interested in Talk of the Sound and New Rochelle.

It would be nice to get up to 1,000 genuine followers. Hopefully some day we will. If you have a Twitter account and would like to follow Talk of the Sound on Twitter you can do that here. The Twitter feed contains every article published on Talk of the Sound and articles that I found Elsewhere on the Web that I wanted to share with readers, mostly about New Rochelle, Westchester or New York State but sometimes articles on technology or funny stuff or items of interest.

Do you think Talk of the Sound should buy Twitter followers? I don’t.