Nobody wants to hear your sales pitch. Maybe.*
For sure, nobody wants to be spammed with irrelevant tweets.
OrangeJackass recently launched the domain, blog and twitter account to experiment with different Internet technologies, including marketing.
We noticed the proliferation of Twitter Reciprocal Following websites and decided to give them a try.
On July 18th, 2009, we created a Twitter account. We immediately opted in to TopFollowed.com, TwitProQuo.com and ExtraFollowers.com. We reviewed VipFollowers.com and determined that it was a clone of ExtraFollowers.com, so we skipped that one.
From a technological perspective, these web services deliver mostly as promised.
From an ethical perspective, there are some serious issues:
- We’re not sure whether FollowersPlus is related to VipFollowers and ExtraFollowers, but the owners used our account to post false advertising.
- One of these services changed our Twitter password and continued to spam our statuses (tweets).
Naturally, good marketing hardly follows unethical practices. However, let us be clear:
Even if a service is on the up and up (we have no complaints with Twit Pro Quo or TopFollowed) – there is no point in following thousands of accounts or having thousands of followers if few of them actually want to talk to you!
The only responses we have received from following accounts through the Twitter Reciprocal Following services are the automated direct messages that accounts send when they receive a new follower.
Twit Pro Quo did send one message in the two weeks that we’ve been opted in:
Summary: Twitter Reciprocal Following is Stupid!
* OrangeJackass actually wants to discover new pitches, so we can help our readers separate the Sweet Ideas from the Stupid Ideas…
We are currently evaluating GDI Twitter Secrets, as a result of following @VDelMonte. So, if this system turns out to be a Sweet Idea, we’ll remember whom to thank 
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