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Is using twiends.com to get twitter followers considered black hatting?
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Hi,
I've been struggling to get followers on Google Plus and Twitter, and recently stumbled upon twiends.com.
It offers an easy service that allows you to get twitter followers very quickly. Is this considered black hating? Even if Google doesn't consider the followers as valid, am I likely to be punished if using their service? Even if it doesn't help rankings, it is nice to have lots of followers so that they will see my tweets which has the potential to drive more traffic to my site, and give awareness to my business.
What are your thoughts?
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At SMX West last month, Duane Forrester from Bing was talking about social signals and Bing, and saying that they look at who you follow as a signal, just like they look at who you link to. You don't want to link to a bunch of spammy sites, and you don't want to follow a bunch of spammy profiles.
I realize that you asked about people following you. Some of the twitter services (though it doesn't look like this is the model of Twiends) for gaining followers follow a bunch of people in hopes of getting people to follow back, then unfollow those who do not follow back. I'm pointing this out here for people in the future reading this and considering other ways to get followers.
Followers don't necessarily read your tweets, much less go to your site. I occasionally tweet from the SEOmoz Twitter account when Jen is unavailable, and there were a couple of times I inserted a bad link into the tweet about that day's blog post. I was amazed at the number of people that I got that immediately retweeted the SEOmoz tweet -- they obviously were not going to the site, but just trying to look like a "real" account by retweeting things from a known and trusted account.
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Do you get followers that are worth engaging with from this?
I just signed my personal account up and straight away got 10 spam like accounts following me
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Hi Cameron, I have been using Twiends with great success lately, and I am wondering if there are any other websites with a similar service, or any other websites that are helpful in driving to social network profiles. For those of you who havent heard of Twiends, I would check it out, as I have been getting tons of followers and likes through it. I will shamefully submit my referral link for anyone that because it is considered to be the black SEO.
But if you really wan to increase followers on twitter then please check this link:
I hope that your query had been solved.
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Hi Cameron,
When struggling over Twitter, +Google or any other social network, I would firstly ask my self if the content of the website is really engaging? Is it really worth sharing it?
If the answer is yes, you most then probably are missing the call to action over the website (just name it and your visitors will follow).
Point out if the article was useful share it with their friends, get something unique over the social networks, make worth it to follow you over there (they get the information faster, there is a community in the background, etc)
As for twiends.com, I've never used it, but it doesn't sound bad (if you list yourself in the right place), but don't forget to place quality before quantity.
I hope this helped gain another view of the problem (even If I couldn't directly help with Twiends.com).
Istvan
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