Why Twitter Bots Are Effective

Scoble and I started a discussion this morning about how a majority of twitter followers are useless (and about how Robert has a big ego.) Scoble’s ego, the echo chamber, and how people in the valley live in their own world is a topic I’d love to discuss, but for now I’d like to concentrate on Twitter, useless followers, bots, and twitter engagement.

The Background
Scoble’s initial comments were relating to how despite having a metric shit-ton of followers, only a small percentage of those followers actually engage in conversations on friendfeed (and I’m guessing even less than that reply to his tweets. Scoble, got any statistics for us?) It’s a common phenomenon happening all over twitter. A majority of people following any given account really don’t react, interact, converse, or otherwise get involved in the conversation.

So Why is that?
There’s a few different scenarios I’d like to discuss. Sure there’s the people who created Twitter accounts, Tweeted their obligatory “I don’t see what the hype is about” and then quickly left the service. For a majority of people, this is the case. With the most common non-article words on twitter being things like “Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating”, it’s easy to see how boring most tweets are. It’s hard to even pretend to care what somebody is eating or listening to. If that’s all my tweeple were tweeting about I’d leave too.

Some of these people simply may not know about twitter tools like tweetdeck which make it easy to stay up to date on Twitter without having to constantly reload the website.

It would be really neat if Twitter could show me some sort of “active followers” instead of total followers. I’d be willing to bet that it’s somewhere around 30%

There’s bigger issues here
There’s much bigger issues than people who’ve lost interest in Twitter. Many of the issues revolve around follower count. I’ve always believe that any service that counts “friends”, “subscribers”, or “followers” is nothing but an online popularity contest. As I mentioned in 2005 the problem is that people will “Friend”, “subscribe to” or “follow” almost anybody because they know that the other person will “friend”, “subscribe”, or “follow” back.

For some reason it’s become common courtesy to re-follow everybody who follows us. Why? I’ve got many followers who I don’t follow back because I simply don’t find them interesting. Scoble takes a different approach – he follows everybody then selectively unfollows those who aren’t interesting. Until Twitter implements commands so I can type “unfollow XXX” that approach just seems like it will take way too much time.

By automatically re-following everybody that follows us we’re simply stroking their ego and increasing their e-penis size. Just like on MySpace and Facebook, Twitter has become a competition to gather the most followers.

Whey does epenis follower size matter?
Follower size matters because Twitter users will click anything. Earlier today I posted a tweet that said “Testing to see how many people will blindly click this: ” and put in a shortened URL. Within 30 seconds I had 16 clicks on that link – and it grew steadily throughout the day. Now I only have around 150 followers, so that’s a pretty good percentage. It’s a much higher ratio than an email campaign or adwords ad and it costs infinitely less.

Are URL shorteners the problem?
Part of the problem has to do with how we’ve come to use URL shortening services. In an e-mail, or on a website users are presented with an actual URL that tells them something about where it leads. The URL is important – if only at a subliminal level. Why do you think Google includes it in all of their ads? It’s helpful to the user (@google, a study on clicking ads with/without URLs would be cool.)

On Twitter, users simply see something like http://su.pr/AOco7l (you probably don’t want to click that.) Where I’d normally make a decision based on where the link leads on a website, I can’t do that on Twitter – so I click just to see where it takes me.

And that’s where bots come in
And that’s why bots are profitable and won’t go away. As long as people automatically re-follow each other and blindly click on links, it will make sense for people to use twitter bots to gather as many followers as possible. Leaning how to buy 1000 youtube subscribers will also give you more followers. You can even buy real instagram followers. The bots aren’t going away, if anything they’re just going to become more prevalent until we change our ways. The best way to fix this? Simply stop automatically re following everybody that follows us. It’s about time we start creating an #unfollowsaturday to “follow” #followfriday.

8 comments June 22nd, 2009

Why the FTC Blog Monitoring is Good

There’s a ton of fear mongering going on right now in the blogosphere about the FTC’s plans to monitor blogs for claims. A lot of bloggers are worried about what this ruling might mean for them and fearful that it could harm the industry.

I don’t think there’s anything to worry about here. If anything, this can only help the plight of many bloggers. While the article above does a great job of adding flames to the fear, it also links to the official .pdf that does a much better job of explaining things.

Quite simply, if we bloggers want to be taken as seriously as newspaper journalists we need to start following the same rules and guidelines. That doesn’t mean we all need to rush out and buy an AP style guide (although I do reccomend it) – but it does mean that I would have needed to say something if I posted an affiliate link there to Amazon. (I didn’t)

Regular banner ads are fine, the FTC is more concerned with the content of actual blog posts. That means the shady practice of paid posts without disclosure is something to worry about.

If you’re accepting free products then blogging about how awesome they are, you should worry. If you went out and bought yourself a new widget and felt like sharing how cool it is, you’re fine.

If you work at a company and blog about that company, you should disclose it. If you just really like Google and want to blog about them, that’s not a problem.

The FTC regulations are really pretty simple. If you ever find yourself asking “should I disclose this?” then the answer is yes. That’s about all there is to it. As a blogger who doesn’t do paid posts or accept free gifts, I have no problem here. Since I often blog about industry related events, I usually do a good job of letting people know where I work and what thoughts are mine vs my employer’s.

If you’re truly in doubt of what you should do, simply don’t do paid reviews or posts and don’t accept freebies. If you do, talk about it. Other than that, put up a page about yourself saying where you work and have worked, and say that the opinions on the blog are yours and not your employers (if that’s the case.)

Other than that, I think the FTC regulations are a good step in the right direction toward leveling the journalism playing field.

6 comments June 22nd, 2009