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Did You Know You Are For Sale on Twitter?

Did You Know You Are For Sale on Twitter?

Did you know that you are for sale on Twitter already?

Yes, according to BBC NEWS a certain company has already started selling us by the 1,000

Australian social media marketing company uSocial is offering a paid service that finds followers for users of the micro-blogging service.

Followers are available in blocks starting at $87 (£53) for 1,000. The biggest block uSocial is selling is 100,000 people.

Ok, perhaps I am exaggerating my claim just a little ;)

What the service offers to do is introduce Twitter users to the company. It is kind of like an individualized and paid for recommendation. Monetized Follow Friday?

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Description on the company site
Description on the company site

USocial estimated that each follower on Twitter was worth about 10 cents a month to a company that got them to sign up. The money would be made from adverts and sales on websites that followers click through to.

Obviously there are no guarantees that any of the folks who get sent recommendations will actually follow the person recommended so it can vary how long it takes to get to the 1,000 that you paid for. There are probably many bots getting these recommendations too. I wonder how many people block the account after getting one of these notifications?

What do you think? Let me know in the comments …

View Comments (5)
  • This is “send your advertisement to millions over email for just $100” for twitter.
    A few months ago everyone thought twitter was kind of “opt-in” and you couldn’t get any spam unless you follow a spammer. Back then I said it would be just a matter of time till spammers get in the twitter game and send “recommendations” as @replies . That time has come.

    I would block such an account when I get the first message from it and I would definitely not follow whomever they would “recommend” just like I stop following those that abuse the #followfriday thing.

    I think twitter should also block this company.

  • As search engines catch up with the popularity of the Twitter phenomenon we will see more schemes and spammers. In fact Bing just announced that they are indexing tweets in their engine in a select test of Twitter users. So get ready for Twitter interst to really spike based on that information.

    Expect to see more SEO and more marketing on Twitter. I am expecting full blown monetization on Twitter with ads in Tweets and on sidebars as Twitter is just too hot to not have the folks at Twitter milk it for all it is worth. Remember when Google first came out? We all said this is so great how can they pay for this and in three years we had AdWords.

    Personally to just have Twitter users just to fill numbers is really dishonest and disingenuous. For people who spam me, I just unfollow them. If you buy the list, you may have these followers for one tweet but for what? Just bragging rights of numbers or followers from Twitter accounts of other spammers?

  • I wish there were a button on the twitter page you could click on to block spam followers in one easy step. I hate to laboriously click through so many times just to get rid of this crap. If Twitter doesn’t get a better handle on the spammers, it’s going to choke on its own success.

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