Auto Follow Marketing Should Be Abolished

[incrediBILL]

Twitter has something worse than spam, it's auto-follow marketers.

You post about anything and some keyword triggers some bot to auto-follow your account and now your followers list is full of useless garbage, not people genuinely interested in having a discussion.

The other day I tweeted about the pregnant lady that got stuck in our elevator and couldn't call for help because she doesn't carry her cell phone so she won't "irradiate the baby" and the next thing you know I'm being followed by a bunch of twitter accounts for people selling baby stuff and cell phones!

IT'S MADDENING!

I was mildly disappointed that no elevator service followed me.

Just a recent example but it happens daily and I just block them.

Surely I can't be the only one that auto-follow bots are driving insane.

Anyone else?

[bill]

I'm not sure how that would be a big problem unless you were auto-following back the auto-followers.

Accounts that auto-follow based on keywords sounds like a very quick way to develop a somewhat-focused list. It's a lot more work to do that manually. You can't expect those poor marketers to do all that manual labor. ;)

[incrediBILL]

Accounts that auto-follow based on keywords sounds like a very quick way to develop a somewhat-focused list.

Focused list? I was discussing someone pregnant stuck in an elevator, I'm hardly buying her a crib or anything. It's just mindless automated spam to annoy the heck out of people just trying to have a little chat.

The only time I find keyword monitoring useful is when you complain about something going wrong with Comcast or some other business and they jump in and help resolve the problem. Got s free burger from Five Guys that way, but it's an exception and not the rule.

The way these auto-follow marketers work all I'd have to do to get 10K followers in a day would be to set up a new account and tweet the whole dictionary and wait for a ton of followers to suddenly appear.

[bill]

If they were simply following you then I wouldn't see the issue. I think you're describing something different. These guys are searching for keywords and auto-tweeting @ your username, right?

Who has time to care or bother with bogus accounts following you?