Image via CrunchBase

Ok, so you’ve unfollowed that guy who sent you the get 16,000 friends in 30 days direct message. Think he’s gone for good? Probably not. See getting lots of followers on Twitter really isn’t that tough (or for that matter, LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook).  Collecting friends is simply a behavior – much like an insect doing a mating ritual or mining gold for your World of Warcraft game.

It’s simply all about repeating a successful behavior over and over and over and over again.  On Twitter this behavior is called refollowing, and it is very common, especially when people decide, for whatever reason, having 36,000 followers might be useful.

Refollowing growth compared to normal growth.

Refollowing is also one of the biggest Twitter annoyances – we polled 95 people to find out what behaviors they considered spam, and refollowing far was the most commonly cited annoyance. That said, refollowing works – it’s the perfect behavior for getting friends. It works for building large profiles. It works for building out targeted friend lists (more on that later). There are three reasons it works:

1. Somewhere between 18-22% of the poeple you follow will follow you back. Of remaining 82-78% if you follow them again, about 16-20% will follow you back… and so on.
2. There’s no way to tell if someone has followed you before. Add to that Twitter’s occasional glitches, and people are quick to follow people that may have “fell off” their following list.  The only way Twitter gives you to stop refollowing is to block the other party.
3. You don’t have a lot of options to build big friend lists if you are not already a celebrity (I suppose having 36,000 followers would make you feel like a celeb, though).

There are many ways to implement refollowing.  You can do so manually, you can use tools like Mr. Tweet.  You can do what I did to test refollowing and use an iOpus iMacro to automate following and a tool like Twitter Karma to automate unfollowing (if you are not doing refollowing, TwitterKarma is a great way to clean out people who you follow, who are not following you).

Here is how refollowing works – in three different versions.

Here’s How Refollowing Works (For Follower List Building)

1. I follow a whole bunch of people.
2. Wait
3. About 20% will follow me back.
4. Unfollow the ones that don’t follow back.
5. Start the process over.

Here’s How the Amateur Spammers Do It

1. I follow a whole bunch of people.
2. Wait
3. About 20% will follow me back.  Send an automatic direct message to sell super risky get rich quick scheme.
4. Unfollow the ones that don’t follow back.
5. Start the process over.

Here’s How the Professional Spammers Do It

1. Get a big follower list.
2. Unfollow your followers.
3. Follow them again.
4. About 38% will refollow you.
5. Send auto direct message for new affiliate offer.
6. Refollow the remaing 62% and repeat steps 7 and 8 as needed.

Ok, So Can Refollowing be Stopped?
It would be hard to stop refollowing without breaking Twitter. At the end of March, Twitter did do a few things to slow refollowing down. First, they implemented a cap that only allows you to follow 2000 people until 1800 people follow you. Then you can follow about 200 more people than follow you. The caps result is slowing the maximum rate you can grow an account by refollowing to about 400 people per day.

Now the question is, what legitimate use to you have for 36,000 followers? Hmm.  And that leads us to our next research desk topic: Twitter Spam.

About the Author: Mike Seidle
Mike Seidle is a leading Internet marketing strategist and has been helping companies with search engine optimization and developing cost effective Internet marketing strategies since 1998. Mike is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service and currently serves on Professional Blog Service's board of directors.

Tags: refollow, spam, twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 12:58 am and is filed under All Posts, Research Desk, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.