Mighty Bargain Hunter

Selling Twitter accounts for fun and profit?

August 5th, 2009 | by mbhunter |

Once in a while I’ll peruse the eBay category Internet businesses and websites for sale to see what people are buying.

To speed up the process I sort by price + shipping, highest first, set the number of listings per page to 200, and scroll down quickly to see what people are already bidding on.  (I miss a lot of gems this way, and of course I miss all of the good Buy It Now items, but I get a good feeling for what’s good value.)

Someone was selling a Twitter account.  There were 16 bids, and the price was over $200 already with five days left.

Here’s the account that’s for sale. (I just tweeted from my Twitter account to see if this person was aware of it — they might not be!)

As of right now, the first tweet on the account was April 8th, 2009, and there have been between 237 updates since then.  Currently, there are 15,155 followers of this profile, and the user is following 14,880.

The content is benign enough: a few responses to tweets and tweets with a interesting facts stuffed in them.  I’ve certainly seen more tedious update streams.  I initially scanned the entire history and the only service I noticed was WeFollow.

Under the categories business, market, and internet.  Hmmm, that’s a blip on the radar.

Then I saw this update:

If you are looking to follow some people, these follow back! @romashkaaaa, @katiel777, @anna7777

I visited these Twitter profiles, and it was basically a re-mixed version of the @bepositivebud tweets.  More profile pictures with good-looking women, same innocuous, mildly-interesting feed content — and they’re all from Minnesota!  What an incredible coincidence!

Yeah right.

I suppose what tipped me off was the 7’s in the other names.  The seller’s eBay ID was “77se7en”.  It’s likely the same person doing all of the accounts.  It appears to be all engineered, and probably not even that much work!  It probably goes something like this (give or take):

1. Set up a Twitter account.
2. Tweet on the account a few times a day.  Maybe follow a few people to get things moving.
   
3. Somewhere along the line, buy a package (or two) of 5,000 followers from eBay for less than a penny per follower.  It’s better to do it this way than to use a free service like a follower exchange because these services will inject extra tweets in your updates in exchange for the free followers.  The latter is a strong giveaway.
   
4. Follow everyone immediately so that they’re less likely to unfollow you.  (These followers that are bought are probably just following people so that they’ll get followed back, as in a follower exchange.)  It may even be possible to auto-follow people.  I don’t know.  That would make this process a piece of cake.
   
5. Unfollow those who drop you. If the follower/following balance goes too far toward “following,” that’s a red flag.
   
6. Keep up the regular tweeting to encourage more to stay and build up a brand.
   
7. Rinse and repeat.  Cross promote as in the tweet above to goose up the follower account.  Maybe even throw a few sponsored tweets in there for a little extra money.
8. Sell the account when the time is ripe. (And, apparently, get a good chunk of money.)
   

I checked Twitter’s terms of service and there wasn’t any explicit rule against this kind of thing, but it still seems like there are better ways to make money than to tweet as a bunch of good-looking women from Minnesota.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with good-looking women from Minnesota!)

What do you think?  Legit, or not?

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