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>Eventually, I hit on a new strategy. Instead of trying to generate good tweets I just followed people at random. I forget the exact number, but somewhere between 15-30% of the people I followed at random would follow me back.

This is exactly what my teenage cousins used to do (maybe not twitter maybe snaphat?) but with one tweak- they'd go through following people, and then once they'd followed they unfollow them again so now it looked like they were following you but you weren't following them back.

"Oh wow, this person with 20k followers just followed me! He only follows 600 other people... I knew I was special. Twittersphere here I come!"

> I suspect it has the same weakness as the "follow back" strategy though. Nobody really cares about the account or connects with it or even understands what you're trying to do. These people aren't your followers so much as they are people who like small talk and coalesced around you for a time.

But if the entire point is to get impressions so you can sell a product, or whatever, do you are if people don't particularly like you?

OK, I can give you a real world example of why parent commenter's strategy is useless.

I had two pages on Facebook based on a very popular movie from the 1980s.

One was the actual studio's page for the movie that I was given access to (as the studio admitted they don't give a fuck about any IP that doesn't have an immediate release - e.g. Blu-ray etc - planned for it), which had over 2 million likes. When you opened a Facebook account this page was one of the list that was often presented to a new user as something they should "like".

The other was a fan page I'd made which was niche, had to be actively sought out, and had 30,000 likes.

I experimented with selling branded products through the accounts. The small fan page sold 10X as many products as the official page that had almost 100X more followers.

tl;dr: if you want to sell shit to your followers they need to be engaged with you - just having people follow you on autopilot is going to create nothing of value.

Twitter users with 1:1 followers: following are known to be trying to get followers and aren't actually reading posts from those users. It's all circular, a bunch of people juicing each other's follower stats.

They use lists or separate accounts to read the accounts they care about. They have bad engagement on their posts

> I just followed people at random.

AFAIK follower building like this is now banned in Twitter ToS

And they can tell? I'm not on Twitter but I can see just following everyone that passes in front of my mouse, and so be it. If that's banned, I'd egg people on to do it more and more and help tear down the idea that follower counts mean f** all.

There used to be services that let you sign up to follow and be followed back. I don't think anyone serious about quickly gaining followers will sit and click manually. They definitely can tell people automatically doing this (at least the naive ones)