No tweets. No bio. 7000 followers. WTF.

Jan 12th

I have a new follower this week. And this is her Twitter profile.

Notice anything odd? Of course you did … you already read my headline and your momma didn’t raise no dummy.

When I saw this anomaly I tweeted it out and asked for ideas on how something like this could occur. A couple of the many replies I received:

CarpData

@markwschaefer devil’s advocate: not everyone on twitter is a biz, or has a purpose. maybe a 3rd party app is using as a membership engine

jaywilliamsPR

@markwschaeferre: missprisci – check out her 1,000-yard stare. She’s as mad as a box of frogs.

neicolec

@markwschaefer I think “she” is associated with this (weight loss) site. http://priscillaproberts.com/ Looks like she’s building a following

tnrkitect

@markwschaefer they are using one of those automated follow services. Not sure how they get around the limit, but they do.

greglinn

@markwschaefer And she’s on 19 lists, but still no tweets!

For the record, I sent Priscilla a DM, expressing my genuine curiosity. No response … no surprise either!

What’s your take on this?

1) How can somebody skirt the Twitter system and get 7,000 folowers with nary a tweet?

2) Let’s say I did follow her back. What are the implications? How would missprisc use me to make money for her nefarious weight loss schemes?

3) And why is she mad as a box of frogs?

Miss Priscilla P. Roberts, why torment me like this? You are such a little Twitter Tease.

humor, twitter, Twitter best practices, Twitter spam

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http://www.adamtudor.com Adam Tudor

I know a few people who have done this – and in each case it’s always been done through a paid follower program such as Twitter Train. There’s was about 10 of these services around a while ago though I’m having trouble finding any that are still going.

The only reason they’ve done this is purely to get noticed more. Getting listed on recommendation sites higher and services such as Mr. Tweet makes them stand out more, more prolific image = recommended to get more sales. At least that their viewpoint anyway.

Personally I think it’s a pointless exercise. 95%+ of these followers are typically just spam followers such as http://twitter.com/Sammy_Scene and hold no value whatsoever. Personally I only use Twitter to engage real people and provide value.

I’m sure I get more RT’s, input, engagement and interest from my 700 or so followers than they do from their 30,000+ spam followers.

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http://www.jonbuscall.com Jon Buscall

I’m with Adam on this one. I get quite fed up with these kind of followers because it kind of spoils the whole point of Twitter: meaningful connections.

I usually take a moment to block these kind of users but I’m probably just projecting my frustration by doing this rather than any real good.

As a related point: How many followers can you really manage? Having hit 500 I can’t imagine how you juggle a genuine 7000!

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http://www.philsimonsystems.com Phil Simon

Perhaps this person removed the content related to the bio?

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http://occamsrazr.com Ike

Allow me to drop in the back half of the recipe:

You have already deduced #1 – Use a follow-back service to leverage as many Auto-following lemmings as you can.

#2 – Once your list reaches a large enough number, sell your account to a business that doesn’t know any better.

Sometime soon, 10,000 people will start seeing updates from @DollarGeneral or @BizGeniuses or @MakeBuxFast – and essentially will have opted into an ad-stream-to-be-named later.

It’s not a high-dollar activity for a human to pursue, but in enough volume can reap a nice paycheck. Especially while the pool of available suckers is still ripe and growing.

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Mark

Interesting. So they rely on auto-follows to build a list of lemmings and then sell the account to a business. I suppose Twitter allows the account to have a new name and email settings associated with the buyer. Wow. There are actually customers for this kind of thing??

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http://occamsrazr.com Ike

Twitter doesn’t “allow” it, as there is no way to track it.

Of course there are customers for it… particularly those who hear about how important Twitter is, and how they need to get a bunch of followers to make it work.

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http://www.twitter.com/steve_dodd Steve Dodd

What would be interesting to know is the depth of the connections past the first level. Perhaps this is a potential spam engine that will launch a nasty payload at some point to all of those lemmings…….. People like that know how to get around the “rules”.

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Mark

The dark underworld of Twitter! Where corruption can occur, it will occur!

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http://Pro.LocalChirps.com Frank Podlaha – LocalChirps

Ah, the curiosity is killer! I’m quite sure the account is upto pure nonsense, but it’s also interesting how offended people are getting.

Sure, you work hard to build followers, and someone comes along (probably paying money) and builds 1000s of followers without seemingly any good reason. We don’t know why, it’s really none of our business, and in the end it doesn’t really matter (1 out of 50 million other Twitterers).

Hmmm, this is like Twitter Imitating Life. Or is it Life Imitating Twitter?

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http://www.simpleitalliance.com Matt Martin

I might be off base, but I think there is an “old” Twitter and a “new” Twitter.

The old Twitter was a really good community of folks, had interesting things to share. At that time it behooved you autofollow everyone to add value to your network and lets face it, the nummber of followers you had was the big measuring stick.

New Twitter is much different. Its gone mainstream and with it comes the spammers and scammers and this has forced a lot of the early adopters to turn their autofollow off. Robert Scoble dumped all of his followers and started over. Now the measuring stick is the value of your network, not the quantity of followers.

Thing is lots of people are still following the old Twitter practices but the game has changed.

@Ike – thanks for sharing your thoughts. A different concept that I hadnt thought about.

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http://www.mltcreative.com Billy Mitchell

Somebody had to ask this question and you are the right man for the job. I’m reading comments now, for answers.

It’s even more curious when they have thousands of followers and a generic avatar.

For a long time I was taking the step to block anyone that didn’t have a website or legit bio and a real stream of commentary. Lately, if they appear harmless and not spambots, I just fail to follow back.

My biggest concern is spammers using my twitter lists to spread their snake oil and somehow using my name in the process.

Hopefully twitter is working to help us avoid that problem but I’ve actually seen my twitter name attached to offers to “test your I.Q” for example.

I am going to follow all the comments of this post to look for answers.

As usual, great question Mark.

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http://nmc.itdevworks.com Neicole Crepeau

What I think is most interesting about missprisci is that you’ve tweeted and blogged about her, helping her star to rise even more. Apparently, you don’t have to do anything to become a semi-celeb these days!

I also took a quick look at her/it’s followers through tweepsinfo. Looks like at least half are probably biz/spam accounts. But there are individuals in there, too.
Just for fun, I went to TwitterCounter to check some info. The account was opened in May ’09. It was pretty actively growing followers until September, when it’s dropped and then plateaued. Which makes me think the folks above are right and it/she was building a following, perhaps for search optimization purposes? Or resale.

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Mark

@Frank Thanks for being a good sport!
@Matt – don’t think you are off base at all. Good insight!
@billy Yes, I think lists are a ripe area for spam problems. Any one can rip them off.
@Neicole Thanks for the guilt trip : )
How would this help SEO if she doesn’t tweet? Just the one site link?

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http://nmc.itdevworks.com Neicole Crepeau

You’re right. It wouldn’t help SEO. Must be planning to sell or spam?

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Jenn Whinnem

As usual, I have satisfied my curiosity and learned something extremely useful from the {grow} blog. Thanks @Ike for explaining they “why on earth?” of an account like that.

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http://macswellhouse.com Kacy Maxwell

I have seen this quite a bit myself and I bet that a majority of her followers are bots as well. Not sure who would want to buy a bunch of bots. Also, she could have been put in the mix of these external applications that allows you to add hundreds of followers at a time. People probably aren’t even checking to see if she is a real person. (Check out TwitIn for what I am talking about.)

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http://coryobrien.com/ Cory O’Brien

You’ve found a great example of the soul-less quid pro quo of Twitter, but there are plenty of non-spam accounts that do the ‘you follow me and I’ll follow you’ method of boosting numbers as well, and it just seems silly to me. Who cares if you have 10,000 followers if none of them pay any attention to what you say, and they’re all just trying to boost their numbers as well? Eventually people will figure out that Twitter’s value comes from quality over quantity, but until then, I guess we’ll just have to continue to block accounts like this that put a dollar amount on the head of every new person they can get to follow them.

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Mark

@Cory It still mystifies me how this sort of gaming can be monetized. Assuming Ike is correct (a given I think!) who would buy such a list? For what purpose? What can you do with a list of lemmings who don’t care about you? Is it like a vanity plate?

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Pingback: The Peevish Side of Twitter « Career. Food. Environment. Stuff.
@EGM013

@EGM013 <—follow on twitter.

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