Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

How to get Hundreds & Thousands to follow you on Twitter

What twitter is today is a result of an evolution from “What are you doing now?” to “See what people are saying about…”. While the earliest version was meant to tell people what most ask when you meet them “What are you doing now?”, currently it has added features that allows it to be used as scrap book, group chatting at one’s convenience, and much more. But some of its features make it vulnerable to be misused. One such feature is that the user name can be changed, unlike all other web applications we have been using till now which keeps username unchangeable. Now this feature can be misused in a number of ways. Let me take each one by example.

As mentioned in one of my previous post I found twitter interesting after I traced a number of bollywood stars using it. One of them is Deepika Padukone. When I wrote that post, her id was @deepikacalling. In the post I correlated the ‘calling’ with BSNL tagline “Hindustan Bol Raha Hai” (India is calling). Interestingly the very next day I found her ID changed to @deepikatweeting (yes I tweeted her about the post). And as I write this post her ID is, hopefully final, @deepikapadukone i.e. her name. Oh! I wrote hopefully because I hope it does not changes again after she marries

Now the twist here is that after one changes the ID, the old ID is available for reuse by any other person. And so it’s no surprise that both the IDs released by Deepika were taken by others immediately and her fans who had known her ID by word of mouth and weren’t already following her, started following the wrong person. Result is that both these accounts have 840+ and 285+ followers respectively (Hey I have just 13-15 followers!).

Tip 1: If you need to get hundreds of followers, grab an ID just released by a celebrity and let her new followers add themselves to this ID. When you are satisfied by the follower count rename it to one of your choice (a few followers may leave and many my continue following)

Fake Profiles (previously held by Deepika)		Genuine Profile

Now let’s Go ahead with next case, relating to none other than Shahrukh Khan who tweets at @iamsrk. No he hasn’t changed ID! It’s only that some other person started a twitter account with ID much similar to his i.e. @imsrk. With this, the fake profile did not gain hundreds of followers but 20900+ followers.

Tip 2: If you need to get thousands of followers, grab an ID spelling much similar to one used by a celebrity and let his new followers add themselves to this ID. When you are satisfied by the follower count rename it to one of your choice (a few followers may leave and many my continue following)

Fake Profile	Genuine Profile

Next case, hmm what about Amitabh Bachchan or Aishwarya Rai? If you are an alert person you will revert saying that they don’t have twitter profiles. But if do not check properly, there are tens of profiles each claiming to be of THE Amitabh Bachchan and Aiswarya Rai and highest following gathered by @amitabh_bigb / @aishwarya_rai. While Amithabh’s profile is autotweeted using the RSS feed of AB’s official Blog http://bigb.bigadda.com/ and even mentioning this address in the profile to make it look genuine, Aishwarya’s profile is manually updated.

Tip 3: If you need to get hundreds to thousands of followers check if the most famous celebrities have their twitter profile or no. If not, don’t waste time and start one. Most fans are so crazy about their celeb icon that they want to follow him/her even if there is no official profile and may end up being your follower. If that celebrity have a blog or official site don’t forget to mention that in the profile as if some alert fans need to check the authenticity of the profile they may follow the site link and finding the same as genuine will consider your profile too genuine, little thinking that there is no link back to the profile for the site/

Thanks for reading to this point. If you thought that this blog post is about teaching how to get hundreds and thousands of followers then you are wrong. This was to make you aware of how people are fooling hundreds and thousands unsuspecting followers and how to fight back. Now that you know from the three tips above how and why people create fake celeb profiles, check the last tip on how to get these profiles banned.

Fake Profiles

Tip 4: On any twitter profile you will find a section in the sidebar with two links ‘Block’ and ‘Report for Spam’. Click on the second on ‘Report for Spam’. Will this get the profile banned or suspended? No!! as just one report from a single person doesn’t trigger the alarm. But what if tens or hundreds do it? Yes then it will surely raise the alarm and then the profile will automatically suspended or will get suspended after a human check. To get these tens and hundreds of clicks, just tweet about the fake frofile and request your followers to check and report for spam and further tweet. This will surely get the such accounts banned and twitter will be a much cleaner place.