I would not be so vain as to imagine that my contributions to the “gaming Twitter followers” debate, nor the post they prompted by Will Heaven at the Telegraph, had anything to do with Econsultancy’s announcement yesterday that it was unfollowing the impressive 19,000 people its @econsultancy account had followed.
But I am going to chip in. Because, Chris Lake, merely unfollowing the 19,000 people your script followed for you isn’t good enough. And nor are the seeming half-truths and curious definitions in your blog post.
Let’s start with the claim that you were “experimenting” with Twitter when you employed an autofollow script. Were you young and naive in the ways of Twitter? Did you just want to see what would happen? Hmm. Smacks of the same kind of bullshit that @Mazi told the Telegraph:
Nadjm has made clear that his Twitter following has grown organically and properly. “I use Twitter as a networking experiment,” he tells me. “I manually follow hundreds of people using Twitter directories and by searching for hashtags such as #Iranelection which particularly interest me. But I have used Huitter.com to unfollow people who don’t follow me back, which can be painstaking otherwise, given the presence of hundreds of bots and spammers on Twitter. I have never knowingly violated Twitter’s terms of service.”
It didn’t wash when he said it, because he was deliberately misleading about his following methods. (Though he doesn’t explicitly state that he only follows manually, that’s what he means to imply.) And it doesn’t wash in your post, either.
It looks spammy to have 19,000 followers and to follow 19,000 people, but we don’t used Hummingbird or any pyramid software tools to grow our follower count. Our Twitter presence has grown organically.
“Looks” spammy? Sure does. You clearly used an autofollow script (which you admit earlier in the post), which suggests that you intended to artificially inflate your follower count. Even if you didn’t intend that, autofollow scripts do have that effect. Why hide behind this disingenuous and cutesy “we’re curious peeps here at Econsultancy” defence?
I presume by “Our Twitter presence has grown organically”, you mean that it has steadily increased at about the same rate. Well, duh: that’s what happens when you use an autofollow script. That’s not what I, and I’m guessing most other people, mean by “organic”.
“We simply want to start from scratch,” writes Chris. But this isn’t starting from scratch at all, Chris: what you’ve done is dump the a suspicious follower/following ratio, leaving a Twitter account that looks like it has been naturally followed by nearly 17,000 people. Forgive me for thinking that’s not plausible: at a bare minimum, the autofollow script is likely to have inflated that 17,000 by a few thousand. If you don’t understand that, you need to get out of social media.
What’s worrying about Econsultancy’s behaviour here is that not only did they start out with bad practices (I don’t buy their claims about “experimentation”), they’re now prevaricating and have embarked on a course of action that appears to make the offence even graver. Effectively, they’re burying bad behaviour, conveniently assuming (because they have no way of knowing) that their Twitter account has 17,000 natural followers. There’s just no way to tell.
So I’m challenging Chris to really start again by using the following method to clear out @Econsultancy’s follower count too. Why not start from zero on both sides?
I wonder if he’s got the balls to do it.
How to really “start from scratch” without losing your Twitter handle
Let’s assume your current account is called @JohnSmith.
- You’ll need to register a fresh, second account (call it @JohnSmith1) with an alternative email address.
- What you want to do is transfer the name @JohnSmith from the old account to the new one. First, log in to @JohnSmith via the website and change the username to @JohnSmith2.
- Immediately log out and log in to the new account (currently @JohnSmith1) and change the name of that account to @JohnSmith.
- Finally, you’ll want to archive your old account (the one with the gamed follower count), so rename that to something like @OldJohnSmith. That way you can still access your old tweets.
Update: In light of a comment below, I have modified my wording slightly to make it clear that even if it’s true Econsultancy only followed “real” followers back, rather than aggressively pursuing new ones, as I charge @Mazi with doing, my challenge stands. What Chris proposes isn’t “starting from scratch” as I understand the term.
Just to be clear here, the autofollow we used followed back anyone who followed Econsultancy on Twitter, we didn’t use it to artificially inflate our follower count.
Your article misses the point, the account has been naturally followed by 17,000 people.
Well, first of all: that in itself, if true, is likely to produce a few thousand spam followers/followings on each side. And if you read my wording carefully, I do account for the possibility that 17,000 have followed you naturally – though I am sceptical about it.
But this is hardly “starting from scratch” by anyone’s definition, even someone with as strange a dictionary as Chris’s.
My challenge stands. Start properly from scratch, if you really mean to start afresh.
I would also add that when we joined Twitter initially, I spent many long hours manually following people back. At the time, our feeling was it was better to follow everyone who followed us, and here’s why.
When I personally joined (@evolutionlondon, now @aliyazaidi) in July 2007, Twitter was a great place to network with influencers, digital marketers, early adopters etc. Hence, I felt it would be valuable for Econsultancy to also have an account, which I started managing in January 2008. See this blog post which I wrote after the first 12 months: http://econsultancy.com/blog/3082-ten-tips-for-twitter)
However, as Twitter has evolved, it now has more spam, more noise etc. So, we don’t feel it’s as valuable to follow everyone that follows us. Rather than undertaking the job of culling our followers, we simply felt it was easier to start from scratch. We’re going to build our list with digital marketers, Econsultancy subscribers and influencers etc.
In an effort to be transparent, I can also tell you that I implemented auto-follow end of July / Aug 2009. Before then, it was a manual process, but as our account starting to grow faster, then we started to use auto follow-back. I was also away in Aug and as I managed the account, felt it would be easier to use auto-follow-back.
Also, we don’t follow first. We follow back people who follow us in the first place. So, it’s true that we acquired 17,000 followers organically.
Hope that clarifies things.
Aliya Zaidi, Senior Research Analyst at Econsultancy
Hey Milo,
Good effort. Firstly, the vanity check: I follow you on Twitter and watched Mazigate – in horror – so you are indeed one of those important back-breaking straws. I realised that the @econsultancy Twitter account looked similar to Mazi’s following/follower numbers and I didn’t like it. But we’ve grown our followers through producing good content, rather than any misplaced shady behaviour, and a close correlation between following/followers doesn’t have to be the result of gaming (although you’re right in suggesting that it might be). As such, I don’t reach the same conclusions about Mazi’s follower numbers. It could be gaming, sure, but it doesn’t have to be.
Experimenting with Twitter. Ok, so it’s hands up time. I didn’t set up the @econsultancy Twitter account, nor did I switch on the auto-follow rule. In fact for the first year of Twitter’s existence I openly admit to not getting it. A colleague signed us up to Twitter and it took me a couple of months to really understand how it might be useful, both personally and as a company. So to say I was naive about the ways of Twitter is actually a massive understatement. I guess we turned on the auto-follow because it was suggested good practice, back in the day. In hindsight, I think it is bad practice to not moderate who you follow (you’d never do this on a personal account, right?).
“Our Twitter follower count has grown organically.” I think our content has helped us attract followers, as opposed to the fact that we had a ‘follow me and I’ll follow you back’ Twitter account. I might be wrong. Maybe our followers are simply following us to attract one more follower. If that’s the case they’re going to be mighty pissed once they see what I’ve done. Let’s keep an eye on our follower count, and – more importantly – let’s take another look at this in a year, to see whether any follower growth is the result of organic (by which I mean not gamed or inflated) behaviour. We’ll know more then, right?
What’s wrong with my dictionary? Starting from scratch? I’ve explained what I’m doing: dropping all followers and manually re-following. I like your challenge but it makes no sense to register a new username, especially since the existing one matches our brand name. We haven’t gamed our follower count, and I’m happy for it to drop as a result of my actions.
In the grand scheme of things 19,000 followers is hardly going to win us any prizes, in the who has the biggest Twitter dick stakes, and spending time gaming social media sites to artificially inflate friends / followers is surely a horrific waste of time?
So look, all I can say is that we’ve never knowingly gamed Twitter. As for half truths, well if you choose not to believe me then that’s your call. I was honest in my explanation (included the SEO / real time search reason for doing this, which I might have otherwise kept quiet).
We may be guilty of trying to write persuasive headlines, compelling content and list-based posts, but I reckon that’s good practice as opposed to gaming. In any event, if the auto-follow mechanism pushed up our followers by a few thousand then doesn’t that suggest that turning it off is a good idea?
Cheers,
c.
Hi Chris,
Firstly, thanks for the good-natured and frank response.
I’m not suggesting you change your Twitter handle. If you look at the method above, you’ll see that it’s a way of dumping followers and following while retaining your Twitter name.
But, having said that, if you did acquire your followers naturally, perhaps there’s no reason why you should do this. And it’s certainly true that your followers look a lot less spammy that Mazi’s (at least, I haven’t come across any German porn or South African hairdressers yet – Mazi has plenty of both). I suppose a couple of thousand extra followers as the result of the autofollow isn’t the end of the world.
My position is: any use of scripts compromises your account, and calls for a properly fresh start on *both* sides. But, as offences go, yours is trivial compared to others.
Thanks again for the reply.
Milo
Hey Milo,
Thanks. Agree totally about the use of scripts… a lesson learned. I think we followed people back out of politeness, as much as anything.
I think jumping through the hoops in your proposed challenge is going to be a waste of time, so I’d prefer to just see what happens and look again in a year to see what the effects have been.
In fact, having just looked at the account, we have lost 2,000+ followers in less than 24 hours. I’d like to think that those are spam / automated unfollow accounts, but who knows? The feedback has been broadly positive though, and a 5% drop in followers seems to be on the high side. I don’t doubt that it will continue to fall for a while.
Cheers,
c.
These guys should use one of the spam blocker tools to clean out their followers. I think it would be stupid, not brave, of them to zero out their followers count completely– but I would guess that maybe 30-40% of them are actually engaged.