There's a real advantage to buying Twitter followers that isn't highlighted in the article.
One of the fastest and easiest ways to grow your follower base is to follow people and hope that they follow you back. But you can only follow 2k people with a new account before Twitter's anti-(follow)spam algoritms kick in and prevent you from following more.
However if you have more than 2k followers, then you are allowed to follow more than 2k accounts. Twitter actually allows you to follow 10% more people than you have following you... so if you have 10k accounts following you, you can go ahead and follow 11k account. That means you can followspam 11k accounts instead of just 2k.
So by buying fake followers, you greatly increase your ability to follow-spam on Twitter. And this technique yields (mostly) real followers. So in short: if it's part of a followspam campaign, buying fake followers is an efficient way to grow your followership much more rapidly.
All that said, I'm not a fan of this technique for many reasons. For starters, it's so unfair to watch other people buy followers and aggressively followspam while you play by the rules. But so many people do it, so the pressure on everyone to achieve these sorts of results is immense. It's vaguely reminiscent of baseball in the 90s: everyone else is breaking home run records, so it's easy to be tempted to try steroids. Also, as a casual user of the site: it's not fun to be followed by so many new accounts that magically have 10k fake followers and are aggressively followspamming to build up real followers.
I hope that Twitter cracks down on this unfair practice, and better polices their system against abuse. In the meantime, just wanted to point out that this abuse is more than just a hack to buy social proof... it's a marketing loophole for Twitter spammers as well.
One of the fastest and easiest ways to grow your follower base is to follow people and hope that they follow you back. But you can only follow 2k people with a new account before Twitter's anti-(follow)spam algoritms kick in and prevent you from following more.
However if you have more than 2k followers, then you are allowed to follow more than 2k accounts. Twitter actually allows you to follow 10% more people than you have following you... so if you have 10k accounts following you, you can go ahead and follow 11k account. That means you can followspam 11k accounts instead of just 2k.
So by buying fake followers, you greatly increase your ability to follow-spam on Twitter. And this technique yields (mostly) real followers. So in short: if it's part of a followspam campaign, buying fake followers is an efficient way to grow your followership much more rapidly.
All that said, I'm not a fan of this technique for many reasons. For starters, it's so unfair to watch other people buy followers and aggressively followspam while you play by the rules. But so many people do it, so the pressure on everyone to achieve these sorts of results is immense. It's vaguely reminiscent of baseball in the 90s: everyone else is breaking home run records, so it's easy to be tempted to try steroids. Also, as a casual user of the site: it's not fun to be followed by so many new accounts that magically have 10k fake followers and are aggressively followspamming to build up real followers.
I hope that Twitter cracks down on this unfair practice, and better polices their system against abuse. In the meantime, just wanted to point out that this abuse is more than just a hack to buy social proof... it's a marketing loophole for Twitter spammers as well.