I was just looking through my Twitter follower list @thetechnewsblog and noticed more and more bots were following me. I then decided to check out a few well known Twitter users, to see if they had the same problem.
Friend of the blog, Veronica Belmont, is followed by literally thousands of bots. The same is true (to a far lesser degree) for many others. I checked out Robert Scoble, Patrick Norton and Chris Pirillo, see below. They all have bot followers, though far fewer than Veronica.
Twitter bots make follower numbers meaningless
I have never been a big fan of either the term ‘follower’ as used on Twitter, nor the way some people obsess about how many followers they have. That’s one of the many reasons why I prefer FriendFeed.
I honestly can’t tell you how many subscribers I have on FriendFeed or how many people subscribe to my friends there. It’s just not a big deal there like it is on Twitter.
From what I can see, the number of bots now following people on Twitter, means that follower numbers are pretty-much meaningless. Right?
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Yes it is pretty useless. If its not a bot its someone real following anyone they see just to spread their name out there as widely as possible. Those are also useless followers.
It’s not just the bots – it’s the idiots.
About 1 in 20 followers now are people I’d want to connect with – and I have to look through the other 19 to get to the one I want to follow. Not interested in “salesguruguy,” “inluvwithsocialmedia” “lovelychest” and so forth – and I don’t want to take the time to check out to see if they are following 97,000 people and are followed by only 45 (all bots). I don’t want to have to check to see that they never post, only post quotations, only post tracking links, etc. etc. etc.
Look, I don’t care that you “flip over social media.” I don’t want to know that you “luv life.” And, I especially don’t care that you can make me an “online millionaire.” Stop following me!
Agree! I twittered, “Is 1000 followers the new 100 followers?” after getting a large number of “now following you” emails from ‘bots and from all the “get more followers quick” follow-fiend tweeps.
I think it’s just fine for anyone (bots included) to follow me. However, I would like to have followers grouped by “Individuals” and “Businesses”. That would help give more value to follower numbers.
Not sure how to weed out the “Individuals” as follow-fiends or not. I guess you just block those?
At last! THANK YOU, someone, for recognizing that a lot of people out there touting how many followers they have are clearly not in touch with *who* those followers actually are and if they are real! Take @sockington, the cat who claims to have gained 600K followers since January? Probably only a fraction of those followers are real. Look at his followers or Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, CNN, etc. you will see most of their followers have no avatar and have zero updates. Clear bot traits. I personally clean out and block at least 50 bots every single night. Do people not pay attention to these things?!
Great! I wanted someone bring this problem to limelight. This is becoming so annoying. All these followers are added to my followers list and all they post is some url links to some marketing stuffs. And there are some tools that will add following and followers to your twitter id automatically. Sigh!. I started using twitter for some fun with my small number of friends. Now we all hate it because of this spamming or bot or whatever you call it. I searched twitter hate and landed here www. istwittercrap.com and surprised to see so many people dont like twitter.
Follower numbers always were fairly meaningless – Twitter isn’t Facebook after all.
Having said that, I always block anyone from following me if they have 0 followers and follow 100+ people themselves. Let’s face it, they’re probably a bot.
Within the last 12 hrs BEN STILLER tweeted @RedHourBen on Twitter — “I am a protozoa in the primordial soup of my Twitter evolution.” — despite savvy tech jargon — so are we all —
this “followers numbers” thing just part of a fluid territory — we are all trying to winnow our way through offloading the junk to get at the good stuff.
Helps to remember that a percentage of our human DNA is categorized as “trash” – no longer useful but still lurking in the genome anyway –
Well if you do it by hand and and rely on such measurements as rt’s and hits on what you post and daily do some weeding and judicious following you can have an impact if you’ve something to say. And there are plenty of people who look for content. Just a matter of finding same.