June 10, 2023

SEOs are Blind Twitter Whores


twitter-bots-cartoon

Continuing in the spirit of my post on Why Twitter Bots Are Effective I was doing some prep work for a future presentation and decided to run a few tests.

I got to playing around with a twitter adder called HummingBird and wanted to see how many people blindly follow me back.

I created a new twitter account, uploaded a picture, posted some random crap about SEO that I stole from other people’s accounts and set up the bot.

I told it to auto follow anybody who mentioned “seo”, had over 100 followers, was following over 50 people, had more than 50 tweets, and didn’t have a default image. (I was trying to avoid following bots, and I think it did a pretty good job.)

I let it run for an hour – from about 4 to 5pm. During that time it followed roughly 112 people.

When I woke up in the morning, my Gmail account looked like a mass mail from Twitter. Fangshan 72 SEOs blindly followed it back!

That’s an astounding 64%! That got me wondering if it was just SEOs, so I did the same thing for they keyword “hockey” and out of around 100 people, I got about 30 followers.

That tells me a few things:

  • Twitter bots are still extremely effective
  • SEO people blindly follow at a much higher rate than the rest of twitter.
  • And most of you still totally over-value Twitter followers

It kind of makes me sad but it does explain why there seems to be so many bots on Twitter; they work!

Oh yeah, don’t forget to Follow me on twitter! 🙂

subserviently About Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones is an SEO from Detroit. By day he works as a manager of SEO & Analytics at SapientNitro where his team performs SEO for Fortune500 clients. By night he's either playing hockey or attempting to take over the world with his own websites - which he would have already succeeded in doing had it not been for those meddling kids and their dog. The views expressed here have not been paid for and belong only to Ryan, not any of his employers or clients. Follow Ryan on Twitter at: @RyanJones, add him on Google+ or visit his personal website: www.RyanMJones.com