Twitter Follow Bots – Good or Evil? The Pros and Cons of Using Twitter Bots in Marketing

RELATED: 9 Twitter Automation Tools To Make Your Life Easier

On Twitter, following users with the same interests leads to a more attractive feed. It takes work to build your Twitter profile. Over the years, some tools have been created to follow and unfollow automatically. Those tools are called Twitter bots. They follow people or businesses based on the keywords in their tweets, hashtags, or user bios. 

We would like you to understand how these Twitter bots work and what the consequences of using them on your profile might be – whether good or bad. In this article we will discuss the following:

1. Functions of Twitter follow bots
2. The Pros of using Twitter follow bots
3. The Cons of using Twitter follow bots

Before we continue, did you know that you can plan and schedule your Twitter posts to publish automatically? Well, most marketers use Postfity to save several hours every week for that. Try Postfity for free today!

1. Functions of Twitter follow bots

A Twitter follow bot is a software that you permit to perform functions and control your account automatically. Some of the features of most Twitter follow bots include:

1. Following specific users – The Twitter follow bot is set to follow people based on these rules: a maximum number of follows per day, the keywords it should look for in tweets or bios and trending hashtags.

Every time the bot comes across a tweet or bio with your keywords, it follows that account automatically.

2. Unfollowing users who didn’t follow back – Twitter follow bots do not just follow. They will also unfollow the users who didn’t follow you back after a certain period of time.

For instance, you can set conditional logic rules like, if a user does not follow back after 3 days, unfollow.

This ensures that you don’t have a disproportionate number of following versus followers. It also helps in following only the users who would like to engage with you.

3. Like and Retweet – Some Twitter follow bots can be set to retweet and like tweets in your newsfeed depending on the keywords or hashtags you target.
4. Direct messaging other users – Have you ever followed someone and then immediately received a direct message telling you to check out their ebook, website or a course they are selling? Well, that was probably done by a Twitter follow bot.

Now that we know what these Twitter follow bots do, let us look at some of the Pros of using them.

2. The Pros of using Twitter follow bots

Twitter follow bots can come quite handy in a few ways like:

• Automatically build your Twitter community

Twitter follow bots expand and grow your following while you sleep with no work needed on your end on a daily basis. Most Twitter tools are set and go options. Once you set your hashtags, interests, and keywords, you leave the follow bot to find and follow the users within those rules.

• Prioritize how you spend your time on Twitter

 Rather than worry about how to grow your audience, you can focus on creating the best content for the followers you get. Content is everything on most social media platforms and Twitter is not any different.

You will need to spend more time on content planning, schedule to automatically publish using a social media scheduler like Postfity and save your marketing time to focus on other tasks.

• Increase engagement on your tweets organically – create great content before you use a Twitter follow bot

Engagement starts with publishing engaging content – relevant, polarizing and visually attractive. Even if you have thousands of followers it won’t help you unless you make your profile engaging first. So let’s start from the basics – how to make your Tweets more engaging. 

According to social media guru Jeff Bullas posts with graphics have a 37% higher engagement. So why not convert your Tweets to images to reinforce your message with a single click of a button?

You can do it in Postfity as well (and schedule dozens directly to your Tweeter feed, or to other social media platforms you’re using – especially Instagram.):

…or using a free tool like Postfity Virals, which allows you to convert a text tweet into a graphic from your Tweet URL in seconds:

But even with a great content you won’t get far without engaged followers. And you stand a chance to get more engagement on your tweets if you increase the number of followers in the relevant audience sector. How to build them? Here’s where Twitter follow bots come into play. 

3. Increase engagement on your tweets

You stand a chance to get more engagement on your tweets if you increase the number of followers.

The follow bots help to increase your audience so that when you tweet, you have a larger audience everytime leading to more replies, likes or retweets.

3. The Cons of using Twitter follow bots

The twitter follow bots have their own disadvantages. These include:

1. Encourages bad Twitter practices

Following and unfollowing large numbers of people every day is a practice that is discouraged by Twitter. There is a limit on the number of followers you can do every day.

For normal accounts, it is 400. Verified accounts can follow up to 1,000 accounts per day. The bottomline is, mass following and unfollowing is highly discouraged. Using Twitter follow bots encourages a practice that goes against Twitter rules.

2. Risk of losing your account

The limits imposed against automated following and unfollowing are technical and should be taken with a pinch of salt. Twitter has banned and suspended many accounts due to using Twitter follow bots. It doesn’t matter whether you reach the limit or not, if it is mass following, the Twitter algorithm will sift you out.

By using Twitter follow bots, you are at risk of losing your account permanently.

3. Too much automation is bad

It is not definite that you get more engagement with more followers. Have you seen the accounts with thousands of followers but not a single engagement on their tweets? Those are a result of either buying or following too many people using bots.

In addition, as we have discussed before, mass following or unfollowing is dangerous to your account.

4. Encourages reduced personal involvement

Social media is about building relationships and it goes further than following people who tweet particular keywords or hashtags. People need to like your content and actually engage with it.

Using follow bots reduces your desire to personally be involved in your account. Software is there to help make some of your work easier, but social media requires your personal involvement to tweet, reply to other tweets and provide a more useful outlook on your profile.

Conclusion

The bottomline is that Twitter follow bots should not be misused. They also cannot replace the human touch of actually engaging your account and manually following people who you will relate with. Lastly, content is still king. More followers does not necessarily make a successful twitter account or marketing strategy: better content does.