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. 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! 🙂
