It’s really not necessary to buy Twitter followers. I recently bought over 60,000 (fake) Twitter followers and it didn’t achieve anything.
But just in case you cannot help yourself, here are a few tips:
- Don’t pay attention to reports (like this article from MarketingProfs; or this infographic from Social Selling Univeristy) which claim “The average cost of 1,000 fake Twitter followers is just $18.” What a rip! I bought over 60,000 Twitter followers for $15!
- Don’t find your supplier via Google! Selling Twitter followers is a questionable profession, so these sorts of websites really shouldn’t be trusted with your personal details (especially those involving payments!). Plus, they’re all way overpriced (see previous point).
- Instead, use an online marketplace (like Fiverr) to complete your transaction. I used Fiverr for my experiment and found it great. Their setup cleverly hides the buyer and seller’s details from each other. Instead, what happens is, Fiverr completes the PayPal transaction on your behalf and releases the funds to the supplier once you (as the buyer) are happy.
- Make sure you turn off email and mobile push notifications for your Twitter account. In a subsequent experiment I conducted (not buying followers, a different experiment; more details shortly), I was wise enough to turn off email notifications but forgot about the push notifications on my iPhone! The result was my phone vibrating non-stop for over an hour, during which, notifications were flying past on the screen faster than I could read them!
- Be prepared for some criticism.
- Finally, if you plan to purchase illegitimate Twitter followers, do so for a purpose. I think the only reason I got away with it was because it was for investigative reasons. Had I been trying to buy followers in order to improve my job search (or some other deceptive motive) I would have been found out and called out. It is the nature of our new social paradigm that bad news spreads like wildfire. Everybody loves a scandal; don’t let it be you.
