Throughout the day you are bound to get email notifications when a person on Twitter begins to follow you; however, you may occasionally find that these notifications lead to users who don’t actually follow you. In fact it may be the second or even third time a notification from that user has been sent to you, and this is not a bug with the service. So why do you keep getting follow notifications from the same users, but they are not actually following you?
Follow Harvesters
Generally this is due to a process called follower harvesting. Follower harvests are tied to blackhat social marketing, and do nothing more than fill you follower lists with sock-puppet accounts, spammers, and users that will never engage with you.
This is often done by “social media gurus” who are on follower based goals, rather than ROI and proper results.
This process was made popular when Twitter’s members were still trying to figure out exactly what the site was for, and many of them found automated applications that would follow a user when they followed you, sent automated thank you messages, and removed the human resources associated with social media.
Essentially this provided Twitter users a time saving process, but caused other users to be annoyed that they were not actually interacting with a person.
So why are businesses and “gurus” now using automated systems to bolster their numbers? Simple, to create the appearance that they are experts in their field, and create a band wagon system where others simply flock to their account because so many others already are.
The Harvester
The harvest process is done through one of two ways: A program that allows you to massively follow others that will return a similar amount of people following you, or a person manually follows you for a brief period of time, and then unfollows you. The automated system is the most likely cause for the mysterious notifications though.
Automated follow systems will either allow users to purchase followers, or you can gain credits by following others. I won’t list any specific examples, but these services are a dime a dozen and they all do the same thing. Some of the applications that you pay for will unfollow people automatically after you follow them while others leave that process to you.
The manual process usually involves a more strategic approach where a harvester goes out and finds people who use common hashtags like #followback, #TeamFollowBack, #InstantFollow, etc.
These people will likely follow you back just because you followed them, thus boosting your follower number. Occasionally people also just randomly follow people as well, and that is where regular users will often begin to notice the mysterious notifications from people who don’t actually follow you.
These two processes are the cause for mysterious follower notifications, and users that are attempting to bolster their account. As a community manager who follows organic social marketing practices it always amuses me to see our competitors participating in blackhat tactics.
It’s also another feather in your cap when you can tell your leadership team that your competition only has the appearance of being more socially apt, where as they are just building a facade and wasting time.
Why it Doesn’t Work
Blackhat social marketing doesn’t work for businesses because you are reaching people outside of your direct audience. When you reach outside of your audience there is a much smaller chance that they will engage with your brand, and that means your time spent tweeting will not return results to complete your goals (Web traffic, product sales, brand awareness).
The key to developing a directed audience of followers is providing them exactly what they need.
If their needs are not satisfied by your brand, they will move on to a business who can. Think back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and how each individual must go through a psychological process prior to giving back what your business what it needs. Avoid blackhat marketing, and find what your audience wants. That is the key to social and digital marketing.
TL;DR: Twitter Follower Harvesters are the reason why you may be getting a series of notifications from people who don’t appear to be following you. This is a result of blackhat marketing, an ineffective approach to marketing with Twitter.
