An Australian company is now selling packages of Twitter followers by the thousand, as a service to businesses looking to improve their presence on social networking sites.
uSocial offers press release distribution, “social bookmarking” services – which increases a business’s site ranking on news aggregators such as Digg.com – and now sells Twitter followers by the thousand.
Chief executive Leon Hill says the business works by analysing existing Twitter users and their profiles, then matching appropriate users with a client.
“A project depends on how many followers the company wants; we target existing followers by geographic location and by interest group. But it can be quite easy or hard depending on the business. It’s easy to find 10,000 followers for a marketing company in the US, but hard to find followers of sales professionals in Dubai, where not many people use Twitter.”
Hill says uSocial then targets specific followers and asks them if they would consider following their client. In the end, he says, “it’s up to that follower to agree”.
“We either send those followers direct messages or ‘tweets’ to their account. Sometimes we might have to promote a business to 2,000 or 3,000 followers before we get 1,000 successful users.”
Hill says the company is now earning annual revenue of about $364,000, and claims the service is more beneficial to businesses than other advertising services, such as Google, because a client is gaining permanent marketing tools.
He recommends start-up businesses create a presence on sites such as Twitter and Facebook as early as possible in order to increase their marketing reach.
“We’re delivering high quality advertising. I’ve seen people buying clickable ads on Google, and they’re spending $3,000 before they make a sale. But if they gain followers on Twitter, they will have them as a marketing tool month-in and month-out.
“I think the greatest thing about social media is that while its time consuming, it’s becoming very easy to find people due to social profiling and things like keywords. A lot of people starting business are generating followers on these sites, and therefore are generating a customer base obtainable at no cost, which for a lot of start-ups is a fantastic thing.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
