I recently received an offer by email of “10,000 Twitter Followers for just £99”. Oh dear! The company also offers spam followers on Google+, fake Facebook likes and imaginary YouTube views.
You’ve got to assume that the company behind this is making money, and at £99, that means that they have a lot of people buying 10,000 spam followers. But how can anyone fall for this: whilst seeing a large number of followers presumably massages some peoples’ egos, surely the realisation that you have 10,000 people ignoring you must eventually hit home.
Offers like this show the problems of poor objectives, particularly in the social media space. Whilst it’s possible to “cheat” on many marketing metrics, social media seems to be particularly vulnerable to poor quality metrics. Marketing managers need to think carefully about the objectives they set: just one relevant and engaged follower would be so much better than the 10,000 that you’d get from this offer!