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My twitter account is followed by hundreds of proposing me to return following, to get software for and learn techniques for getting thousands of followers.
But why?

I personally read most of all the feeds of news, magazines, quotes (citations) bots that do not talk back and "whom" I do not follow back. Well, I am not interested to "talk" or DM (Direct Messaging, private, that is available through mutual following) with feeding bots, anyway.

I know from experience that most humans do not read DMs (direct messages) because DMs contains only/mostly spam. This is what following for.

From the other hand, who communicates the most effectively?
They are spamming bots that reply, quote, thanks through DM and Tweets for re-rweeting, immediately Tweet that someone unfollowed them, retweet the Tweets of others, Tweet extremely interesting sayings/quotes (from their database), etc. having very active life!

Well, I am not interested in followers, I am interested in readers of my Tweets (and DMs).
What's the point of getting thousands of followers (that do not read but only feed their own publications/promotions/ideas to others)?

I can read Tweets of others independently on following/being followed

Why and how did this concept of following appear at all?
Why following is introduced at all?
And more intriguing why I am sold/convinced the ideas of following (getting thousands followers), or follow-me-and-I-return-following-you?

Please explain me, I do not grasp the rationale under following

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You need to edit your question to focus on something. I count 7 question marks in what you wrote and still don't know really what you are looking for? – Michael Pryor Mar 11 '11 at 20:48
@Michael Pyor, my main question is in the title. If someone needs explanations, it goes inside the question for its variations (synonyms) – Геннадий-Ванин Mar 12 '11 at 1:08
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I'm trying to help you so your questions don't get closed. Please remember this isn't a site for discussions. – Michael Pryor Mar 12 '11 at 14:33

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

It's a logic failure.

Ignorant marketers see successful companies with thousands of followers (twitter or facebook) and they think "oh, to be successful, we must also get thousands of followers!"

If you are successful then you will likely get thousands of followers. If you get thousands of followers, it does not mean that you will be successful.

This leads to hilarious situations like what just happened in my company, where we discovered that one of our primary competitors was paying for followers on facebook. Then the company that they were paying hijacked their facebook fan page over some payment issues.

That failure in logic is just another "snake oil" method of marketing that savvy salesmen tend to use to part other, more ignorant, marketers from the money in their marketing budget.

The benefit to a strong social following is that in theory you have thousands of interested customers/clients who are keeping up with changes and announcements for your product. A good example of this is Old Navy which posts sales to their facebook fanpage. This gets their community involved in the company and directly increases sales through practically free advertisements that are injected into their follower's facebook news feeds.

So a strong following is very valuable, but only if you use it right and only if the people are interested in your product as your product, and not because you bribed them to be there.

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up vote 1 down vote

Its actually retarded! If you are following 1000 people you never really get anything out of twitter. To try and get 10000 followers is just plain dumb, the quality of the followers you get is useless.

Twitter is great for one thing, FREE SMS. We create twitter accounts and use it for our own APP monitoring, and Server uptimes. Recently we thought about building a twitter to keep track of our own saas billing.

Twitter as a marketing tool will die soon. Its a fad. And unless if you are a Movement, or maybe justin beeber, then you are probably not going to get much out of 10000 followers or following 10000 people.

Id rather have one good friend than 100 bad ones.

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The good friends on twitter are different. Some for reading - bots feeding news, quotes, sayings, info, etc. Others - for retweeting your tweets. But noone of them is for following or DM-ing. This is crazy idea to publish your private diaries and comm with friends or have human friends on internet – Геннадий-Ванин Mar 16 '11 at 2:37

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