On Saturday the 25th I received a notification in my inbox that a new Twitter account had started following mine, something that happens at least a half-dozen times daily. As Twitter has understandably never been able to completely rid itself of its spam problem, many of these are commercially-motivated, and not in the way @Zappos or @DellOutlet are. And by that I mean they are spam accounts.
But this one was @CQPolitics, representing Congressional Quarterly, the venerable political news organization recently acquired by The Economist Group. [Also: CQ is a competitor of my former employer (and in the interests of disclosure: client of my current employer) and has at various times employed various friends and associates of yours truly.] I followed back.
I noticed almost immediately that there was a wide gap between the number of Twitter accounts following @CQPolitics and the number of accounts CQ was following back. According to the e-mail notification, the account had 17,929 followers and was following only 84 people. I had become the 85th. This is highly unusual; the very few Twitter users with a ratio of followers-to-friends this lopsided are typically famous-offline celebrities who have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon: Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah), Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and Shaquille O’Neal (@THE_REAL_SHAQ) for example. Although these celebs have north of 1.5 million followers (Kutcher has twice that) even Shaq follows 555 people back.
I might have liked to believe, for a moment, that I should be flattered CQ had counted me among its Beltway media personalities worth following. But I didn’t buy that, either. I saved a screen cap of @CQPolitics’ friend grid, featured in everyone’s right hand column, and decided to revisit the matter in a few days. This is what it looked like last weekend:
A few days became last night, when I returned to the page and compared the grid to the one from a week ago, this is what it looked like:
Quite a bit different, no? I thought so, and decided to check it against TwitterCounter.com, which produces graphs of Twitter users’ recent follower/following history. First of all, I wondered, how many other users have been following @CQPolitics over time? The graph looks like this:
And then, over time, how how many other users had CQ’s Twitter account been following back? This is what I found:
Well, that’s something. What are we looking at? In the first chart, we can see CQ’s followers growing organically since April, only to drop off slightly in the past couple of weeks. But this drop-off is only the ripple from a much bigger change we see in the second chart: after following and unfollowing accounts as it climbed from 4,600 friends to 9,200 (more about this below), CQ decided to shed them all — in fits and starts and then, last weekend, it deserted the rest in one fell swoop: somebody spent an entire afternoon (at least) unfollowing some 9,100 Twitter accounts. Or they set up a bot to do it for them.
The resulting impression is that @CQPolitics has so much clout that it can attract a substantial following without having to reciprocate in kind. But as we can see, this impression is false. I assume they wanted their account to beat Beltway it-publication Politico, whose @Politico account has 16K+ followers but only follows two Politico-owned accounts. But as TwitterCounter shows, @Politico’s large and growing number of followers happened without them playing games with their Twitter followers. Now, that account is decidedly anti-social — but at least it’s honest. CQ took the shady route.
Even now, they are still playing games. As of this morning, @CQPolitics is following 126 accounts, relatively quite a few more than a week ago. But I am sure these accounts are expendable too, and part of the same ploy: follow a Twitter account in hopes they will return the favor, then once they do (or even if they don’t) unfollow that user in hopes they will not notice. The follow-unfollow routine is one of the spammiest practices a Twitter user can undertake; more sophisticated versions of this practice have gotten other accounts banned.
So, it turns out CQ is running a de facto spam Twitter account (even their tweets are piped in RSS content via Twitterfeed, which would be no problem under other circumstances). And I am all the more sure of this based on one very good piece of evidence: @CQPolitics is no longer following me.
Update: Well, now I think I know why they’re doing this — in fact, I was more right than I knew about trying to beat Politico. Fishbowl DC is comparing the Twitter followers of Beltway media institutions in a weekly post, every “Twitter Count Friday”. And it looks like nobody has wanted it more than CQ.
What’s the benefit of following then unfollowing? I’m sure there isn’t someone at CQ who was ever following the Twitter stream of the account.
Not sure what you mean, Sean. The benefit is a gaining a large number of Twitter followers without having to appear to give reciprocity. Meanwhile, I’m sure someone at CQ is following the account — although I’m not so sure they’d be getting much out of it.
is it better for CQ to be following 17,000 people (roughly the number of people following them)? is that realistic? and what’s wrong with CQ following people so they can be made aware of its feed and then stopping?
the @CQpolitics account (http://twitter.com/cqpolitics) is clearly nothing but a feed (like RSS) of their articles… it’s not like they’re having a conversation with people on twitter at all. whether or not that’s okay is a different conversation, but following folks to help them learn about the @cqpolitics account doesn’t seem like necessarily a bad thing. and since it’s clear that they’re never going to participate in a conversation with anyone, subsequently unfollowing seems perfectly legit to me.
fascinating. so its all the rage to have a high disparity btw followers and followed, like its a sign of some mighty popularity? that thinking is skewed, what, journos ultimately want some broadcast model of information delivery?
Bill, what I’m wondering is what the benefit CQ gets from following a smaller number than a larger number. What I don’t get is what does CQ gain from not “having to appear to give reciprocity”? I figure most Twitter users will follow CQ based on the quality of the Tweets.
I manage a Twitter account with a few thousand followers and following a few thousand. What benefit would I get for going to all the trouble of unfollowing most of them? I don’t see anything beneficial. It sounds like a lot of work for nothing.
Sean, I could be wrong but I don’t believe this is any more sophisticated than wanting to appear as if they are more naturally popular than they are. Remember that they are also doing this in large part to win a contest. I think the benefit is really only perceived, and not all that beneficial. They are acting rationally, but not wisely.
I think there are lots of automated online tools out there that make people follow you.