BUY LIST OF POLITICAL FOLLOWERS OF TWITTER

POPULARITY FOR SALE
Author (s): Fernando Braga
Correio Braziliense - 27/06/2010


TWITTER
Companies are buying politicians and adherents of social networking in a parallel market to show success. Portfolios with 100 000 people might cost $ 9500

Having thousands of followers on the Internet to comment on their actions and manage a viral marketing can play with a lot of people is something that every company - and at election time, politicians - want. However, being popular in the network can have, literally, at a price. Eye on the strength of the emerging social media tools, sites are selling packages with thousands of followers who seek to increase the number of people who follow a particular profile on Twitter.

One of the major companies operating in this business is uSocial Australian, who took the fever that exists around the microblog to offer a variety of "portfolios of Internet users," composed of many different user profiles. A package with the minimum number of thousand followers sells for 62 euros (about $ 170). But those who want to increase the popularity of the network may choose a larger package and reach 100 thousand followers at a cost of 3 500 euros (U.S. $ 9.5 thousand dollars). Any purchase is made simple. Simply enter the page of the company, complete a brief registration and report the number of international credit card. The practice causes much controversy and even Twitter has already filed a lawsuit the U.S. to disable the service, accusing him of spamming.

Another site that offers the miracle of the multiplication is the Buy Twitter Follows. On the homepage, the company explains that after making the registration, the process takes two to seven days to begin generating results and, like many other services running on the margins of legality, to guarantee customer satisfaction.

New friends
The Courier spoke by phone with a seller of followers who works in Londrina, Parana, and found that there is no need to go to the international pages of the internet to buy "new friends". According to a person identified only as Márcio, specific software that takes advantage of loopholes in the system scans the Twitter about accounts with the largest number of followers and replicates the invitations automatically. "Many companies and individuals linked to politicians seek us. From keywords, we send thousands of messages to specific target groups of users, "he says.

Márcio beyond. "In past elections, I worked with Orkut, which restricted my access. With Twitter's okay. Also, we are careful not to divulge a lot of that software, because programmers can change the system and block, "he says. "If we send a thousand people, but only 100 accepted to follow a profile, and sent back to other 900 users," said Marcio, who says charge $ 5000 for a minimum package of 1 million messages.

Ghosts
Interestingly, this election year, the number of persons accompanying the profiles of politicians has increased considerably. According to a survey of the Secretariat of Social Communication of the House of Representatives, the number of followers on Twitter members more than doubled in the last month for the previous survey, from 231 271 to 514 340 followers in January.

For Vivian Pratt, a specialist in digital law office Lawyers Pinheiro Patricia Peck, the practice of buying followers can be compared to spam, since users do not opt to receive these types of messages. "Although there is as yet no legal prohibition against the practice, the very term use of Twitter says it's the marketing of profiles or other services related to the site," he recalls. "Many of these followers do not actually exist, they are only ghosts profiles designed to increase the volume of users," he says.

Through a statement, said it regularly monitors Twitter accounts that are offered for sale, as well as those that indicate spam activity. "We close most of these profiles well before they are sold. The minority of customers who remains suspended and is later identified as soon as any activity begins spamming "he says.



The number

85.3%
Total of 75 million Twitter users who update the profile at least once per day

Criticism of the pirate trade


The trade of pirated Twitter followers is a matter of great controversy among professionals working in digital media consultancy. The co-owner of RBW Ricardo Barreto raises the ethical issue that involves the purchase of followers in the social networking site. "Of course everybody to be followed, but more important than acquiring new Internet, one must know how to keep them interested in what Mark has to say," says Baker, noting that, like other social networks, Twitter is a communication tool, but of relationship. "Buy followers not guarantee a successful campaign. We need to do strategic work, mapping the opinion leaders of different subjects to thereby reach a larger number of users, "he says.

The director of interactive agency Santa Clara, Pedro Porto, confirms that many are using the microblog to inflate the number of followers. "The fact that a person has 100,000 followers not to say that it is more important than who has 10 000. When buying followers, you are making up a number and taking the same metric of traditional media, which measures the audience of an old-fashioned way, "he reports.

The view port is supported by a recent study published by the Max Planck Institute in Germany, which analyzed the impact of more than 1.8 billion messages sent by 80 million subscribers to Twitter. When crossing the users' data with the largest number of followers and some measure of influence, as the amount of times a message was reproduced or mentioned in microblog, the researchers concluded that being popular in the social network does not necessarily mean to be influential. The study says most followed users on Twitter are celebrities and public figures. However, users with more retweets, or more influential, are those that add content like media and search tools.

Microblog
According to consulting Sysomos, 93.6% have less than 100 followers on Twitter. Already 92.4% followed less than 100 people on their profiles. Only 5% of customers microblog account for 75% of social network activity.

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