How I gained over 100 Twitter followers in one week without writing one Tweet. EVER....

So I stumbled on this by accident a little while ago while working on TwitterStand earlier this semester.  I thought it was quite interesting and worth a (semi-)formal study.  So I set up a new Twitter account @UniqueShout.

This is what the account looked like prior to adding any new followers:

Just your standard, normal account that follows 5 accounts and sits idle.  I created the account on May 25.

Almost instantly I followed 1000 people using the Twitter API.  36 hours later I followed another 790, however I was already being followed by 30 Twitter users at this point in time...

One week later I'm sitting at 105 followers, yet I still yet to produce A SINGLE TWEET!

It's now been two weeks and the rate of new followers has subsided, yet I do currently have 111 followers.  There have been several accounts that stopped following me, yet I believe these are spam/porn accounts.

So you're likely saying "Most of these accounts must be spam/porn accounts!".  Well, not exactly.  Porn seems to account for 10% of the followers.  I think many of the accounts that dropped were spam accounts.  Let me first step back and say something about the accounts in general that are following @UniqueShout.  They fall into one of four categories:

1. Spam/porn accounts - These accounts are not real people but the exhibit the following behavior:
1. All have a hyperlink in their 'about' section that leads to (what I believe to be) a porn site.
2. They all produce 3 Tweets over a 36-hour period.  Each Tweets looks to be a crafted Tweet that is about nothing yet has text to possibly fool spam filters like those found on email servers.
3. All accounts produce their Tweets at roughly the time, suggestive these accounts are run by the same person/entity.
2. Real people who love to Tweet.  These are people who Tweet about their daily lives and random thoughts.  This looks to be 10% of the people who are following this account.
3. Legit newsworthy Twitter users, like local CNN corespondents, local news affiliates and other micro bloggers.  This looks to be ~30% of the followers.
4. Mixed accounts that include small businesses, organizations and users that communicate over Twitter.  I don't consider these personal accounts as the account might be a front for a small business, a personal business or organization.  This appears to be about 50% of @UniqueShout's followers.

Here is the latest snapshot from the account showing 111 followers.  Note some of the accounts that are following @UniqueShout, one of which is even @ESPNDeportesMia

I think the following take aways should be noted here:

1. It's quite interesting WHY the account has so many followers despite the lack of Tweets.  I'm now curious about the possible mining techniques Twitter-mining sites have to decide who to follow.
2. I may have produced a method for identifying spam.  While not optimal or exhaustive, it appears to find accounts that are owned by similar entities.  Is this a possible method to trap/ID spam BEFORE it does its dirty work?
3. The accounts I followed are mostly news-spreading accounts.  But not all of them.  2% of the accounts have never Tweeted and are followed by very few people.  Some of the accounts are icons on Twitter (@cnn for example) yet some are small local news outlets.  A further study should find the minimal subset that produces the most followers.
4. I'm unsure what happens when I stop following the accounts @UniqueShout is following.  This will be a follow-on study.
5. I'm unsure if this is a good method to add followers or not.  One thing is for sure, if you want a high-follower count, this is a way to get a decent amount quickly and easily.  So if you're setting up a small business for example, this might be a method to jump-start your Twitter account.  At some point I'll do this to my established, personal account and see if I get similar results.

I'll take a deep dive into these accounts in my next blog.