This post is a Social Media word of warning. If you see any Twitter or Social Media service that claims it will get you hundreds or thousands of new followers or friends in hours…STAY AWAY! I have written about this before in tweets and articles that the only way you should grow your following is by your content alone. People should want to follow you because of what you have to say, what you talk about, your humor (or lack there of), your interests, your ideas, your thoughts, etc.
It should NOT be some sort of automated, pyramid-scheme system where you sign in and click a button and away you go with hundreds of “following” notifications popping into your email box. It’s pretty easy to identify the Twitterers who have done this automated method. They have 10,000 followers but they are also following 10,000 people and they have 10 tweets and have been on twitter for 2 days. There is no humanly way possible to generate that many followers, unless you are someone like @Oprah who had 35,000 followers just minutes after her first tweet. As of this writing, she has 1,324,028 followers, is following 14 (obviously she doesn’t auto follow) and has only 46 updates.
Personally, I screen every follower I get to see if I want to follow them back. It’s a bit of a time consuming process, but helps control the content feed that I get coming in through Twitter.
Today, I saw a tweet from a friend (who works in the media) that simply stated “Join our follower club #FlockToMe and get thousands of new followers for free! http://bit.ly/z1TfK”. I sent him a DM (Direct Message) stating “Hmmm, not sure about the FlockToMe concept. I think following should be organic, no? Otherwise a bit spammy?” Well, he was a pretty trusted source of mine so I figured I would check it out.
The FlockToMe homepage looks like this:
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