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Twitter and machines that follow you

October 1, 2009

90 per cent of the people (things) who begin to follow me each day on Twitter are machine generated. These things are not included in my current followers as these things stop following me when I don’t follow them back. Let me explain.

Each day I go into my email to see 50 or 60 separate emails informing me that 50 or 60 more people started following me on Twitter.

Being the nice guy that I am (or idiot) and wanting to get to know certain real people through Twitter, I open up each mail from a person with a real name, click on the link to the user’s Twitter page, and see who the new follower is. I then follow back about 10% of the people who started following me.

How did these people who have nothing in common with me come to follow me? Machines.

People, starved for attention or wanting to spam me with ‘law of attraction’ or ‘how to get 30,000 followers on Twitter’ tweets should I mistakenly follow them, sign up for machine driven Twitter auto-follow services.

Some machine then goes out for them and automatically follows people on Twitter who have used a term in Tweets that these clowns said they have an interest in when they signed up for the machine service. The same machine unfollows people who do not fellow these people back – if you get the numbers you’re following too high in comparison to the number you’re following Twitter won’t let you follow anymore people.

Believe it or not there are even legal professionals who use these auto follow machines. I can see that from the same people coming back to follow me when I didn’t follow them a month earlier when they last followed me. The machines stopped following me when I did not follow back and now the machine is back.

This machine thing is nuts. It’s like someone wanting to network and engage people in the flesh but sending out machines to do it. Imagine machines showing up at a Rotary meeting or a networking function at an industry event. Machines that say I am here to get you to get to know Bob Smith, but Bob lacks the social skills to do it personally.

These machine buyers remind me of Greg Storey’s description of the folks who buy SEO gimmicks from snake oil sales people as deep-sea life forms so anxious to get discovered that they’ll do anything to get noticed especially if it means fifteen seconds on Discovery HD.

I’ll continue to spend my 10 or 15 minutes per day seeing who the people are who follow me on Twitter. There’s too many good non machine driven folks I’d like to get to know. And even with the deep sea life causing us all grief, Twitter remains fun and an excellent way to both brand my expertise and build relationships with people.

PS to Larry Bodine: Add this post to your 79 factoids proving that any legal professionals who say they are successfully using Twitter for client development are lying. ;)