What are Twitter Followers Worth? <1¢

Monday, February 1st, 2010 by Jordan McCollum

What are Twitter Followers Worth? <1¢

Basically since Twitter became popular, there have been companies offering “pay for followers” services. Back in August, for example, we talked about one company offering 1000 followers for $87. But it turns out those followers are way overpriced—the going rate on eBay is less than 1¢ per follower, as TechCrunch reports.

Some of the Buy-It-Now listings include 5,000 followers for $20 (which comes to 0.4 penny/follower), $5,500 for $40 (0.7 penny/follower), $1,100 for $10 (0.9 penny/follower). You are not actually buying followers outright (Twitter doesn’t allow people to transfer their followers), but rather services which “guarantee” getting your account up to the promised number of followers through “proven and safe methods.” Some even only count reciprocal followers (followers who follow back).

The best part, of course, is exactly how they accomplish this—you guessed it. Probably bots and spam accounts (Mechanical ~~Turks~~ Chinese, actually), though TC isn’t certain all the eBay purveyors use that kind of service. No wonder only 17% of Twitter users are considered active!

As TC points out, it seems like there should be some countermeasures for this from Twitter. Suggestions include such things as Verified User status, a metric of measuring engagement through ReTweeting/DMs/conversations/tweets, or displaying last login.

What do you think? How can Twitter make attracting legit followers more attractive than a fraction of a penny per fake follower?

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8 comments on “What are Twitter Followers Worth? <1¢”

David at seo-writer.com Says:

February 1st, 2010 at 4:17 pm

Twitter shouldn’t have to do anything. If people are stupid enough to think that they can buy relationships and loyalty…as the saying goes, they get what they pay for.
Clive Hawkins Says:

February 1st, 2010 at 5:06 pm

It seems to be a common theme that once a service or website gets popular, there are people or companies that try to make a fast buck, whether or not the end result is worth anything. It seems to be a sad and desperate attempt by Twitter users to buy followers that will have no business benefit, but at least their numbers look good!

I guess it should be buyer beware and it’s not something that Twitter could easily monitor, unless they can track unusual activity trends. Now if Google was involved…
Sean at search engine optimisation UK Says:

February 2nd, 2010 at 9:27 am

It seems foolish to allow yourself to be effectively spammed by allowing someone to sell your information to an advertiser.

It is like the email lists that were available a few years ago, not worth the time it took to download.

Thanks for doing the math and working out the true value of a Twitter follower, hopefully the people buying the contact details will come to the same conclusions and stop the trade themselves, no demand should equal no supply.
Josh Braaten Says:

February 2nd, 2010 at 10:07 am

I think Sean is dead-on with his reply. This is like email before people moved from the direct (spam) model to the “permission-based” model that a lot of companies are moving towards.

You only want a follower if they want to follow you. Follows of that nature may end up being worth far far more than a penny.
Josh Braaten´s last blog ..Best Free Online Marketing Tips for Those Who Ask
Kristina Allen Says:

February 2nd, 2010 at 3:29 pm

I don’t think it’s up to Twitter to make attracting legit followers attractive; if a person or company tweets solid content, legit followers will organically find their way to that information via searches and RTs. Quality of followers is more important than quantity anyway– what’s the point in having a million followers is none of them can actively engage in the conversation you’re trying to start?
Mike Bensonn Says:

February 2nd, 2010 at 11:04 pm

If money is exchanged for followers, it is the same as if time was exchanged for followers. Besides, Twitter as a tool for marketing will always be filled by spam. What is the difference between marketing and spam? What makes marketing more legit than spam?
Mike Bensonn´s last blog ..The Social Search Engine
Digitivity @ The Digital Life & Tools Blog Says:

February 3rd, 2010 at 6:37 am

Amazing how stupid people are.

What are these “proven and safe” methods for getting followers?

You can’t make (real) people follow you.

If you pay to get 1000 followers, you’ll really have gotten nothing for your money.
Digitivity @ The Digital Life & Tools Blog´s last blog ..After the iPad: the Google Tablet?
Roger Harris Says:

February 6th, 2010 at 1:01 pm

This is very interesting. This will just lead to people creating accounts just to be followers and earn a few cents here and there. But this misses the point of Twitter, which is to follow people who provide the most value and interest and thereby avoid cluttering your own Twitter feed.

My recommendation is that people do not bother to follow the most followed users. When someone like John McCain has 1.7 million followers, chances are his most important tweets will filter down to you via other users retweeting his stuff.

I had a conversation about this with @harvardsocial on Twitter just the other day, resulting in a blog post which was retweeted: “RT @rharris Blog post Follow Your Own Path: Tweets betwn me & @HarvardSocial about ideal # Twitter users U should follow http://ow.ly/16vGJZ“

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