Hot Girl vs. Average Girl vs. Dude: The Great Twitter Experiment.
Embarrassed By Your Lack of Twitter Followers? Here’s How to Get Some — Fast!
Let’s face it, all these “experts” talk about, “Oh, it doesn’t matter how many Twitter followers you have, it’s all about the quality of those followers,” which is certainly true, BUT there’s no denying it IS hard to get people to take you seriously when you only have 10 or 12. In fact, it can be downright embarrassing, for a new business especially. It’s a dilemma everyone new to Twitter faces — the awkward and embarrassing no-followers phase, where all you have are a few people — mostly friends — following you. For some people this start-up phase lasts only hours or days, for others it seems to take FOREVER to grow.
People go to great lengths to get lots of Twitter followers just to look good. They resort to begging. They follow a lot, in hopes of getting followed back. It’s a complicated system of follow, wait for them to follow back, then unfollow to follow more, which takes a lot of time and energy. Others just go out and BUY a shitload of Twitter followers from some shady service only to end up with 50,000 followers from Vanuatu, or God knows where, whose only purpose is to feed their ego.
Starve the ego, feed the soul.
Remember that saying? Well, artificially inflating your Twitter followers does the opposite. It feeds your ego, but starves your soul, or that of your business. It gives you the satisfaction of having this huge number of followers on your profile, but at what expense? It takes money, it takes time, it takes energy — all of which could have been better spent getting real followers; people who like you or whatever it is you sell; people who are more likely to BUY from you. And when, people figure out that’s what you did, it can ruin your reputation, or credibility, especially in social media secrets — or at the very least (or most) just make you look stupid.
Granted, it sucks starting at zero and having to grow your follower base organically from there. We’re all in a hurry. We need instant gratification. We can’t possibly announce a new business or a new product to the world and ONLY have a dozen followers. We’ll look stupid. I get it.
I often tell clients to get the Twitter account started months before any new business or product launches, that way you don’t have to worry about coming out with just a few followers. You can give yourself time to build. But they don’t always do it, and in the zero-hour we’re trying to get them some followers just to save face. Or I get established clients who feel like they missed the boat and now want to play catch-up, trying to get 1,000 or even 10,000 followers in a week.
That’s easy to do if you’re on the cover of Forbes or Time this month, or on the New York Times Bestseller List, or if you’re regularly talked about on TMZ or CNN. For the rest of us, however, it can be a total grind. But well worth it, nonetheless.
All that said, this article is NOT about how to get 1,000,000 Twitter followers overnight. Any means less than organic, in my book, is counterproductive and toxic to you and/or your brand. But that’s not to say you can’t “cheat” a little bit. It’s a given that every Twitter profile has it’s share of bogus followers — mainly the people who are just following you in hopes of you following them back. Those people are everywhere. And when launching a new Twitter profile, you can use them to your advantage.
Rather than wait for them to come to you, you can use them to get over that initial follower hump — to feed the ego enough to make your new profile “presentable” without too much starving of the soul. We recently conducted this experiment to prove just HOW to do it:
The Great Twitter “Experiment”
First, we created three separate Twitter accounts, all at the same time, all with the exact name and profile, and each profile followed the same 1,000 people. The only difference between the profiles were the avatars:
- Profile #1 was “The Dude” — just a normal, average-looking guy, clean cut, khakis, untucked button-down, goatee, baseball cap, college-y. Not exactly Brad Pitt, but the average American male. This is the same guy you see at every college bar in America, drinking some weird-named microbrew, thinking he’s cool, and bragging on all the shit he’s going to do once school is done.
- Profile #2 was “The Average Girl” — nothing fancy, just a plain, average looking girl, modest, no cleavage, not too skinny, not too heavy, but right in the middle. Shoulder-length, sandy brown hair, great smile, but she wouldn’t exactly stand-out in a room full of girls. This is the girl who works at the pharmacy, or maybe she’s a nurse’s assistant at the hospital, or maybe works in some kind of office doing officey stuff (not fancy sales or marketing stuff, more like casual admin work.) She’s far from fancy. I’m trying here, hopefully you get the picture — just think of the most average-looking girl you can think of, especially in contrast to #3, and this is her. (And no offense to the average girl we used for this profile, the description above was her own words.)
- Profile #3 was “The Hot Girl” — it was the hottest photo we could find, barely clothed, not nude, but certainly sexy and suggestive — exotic-looking, fake tits practically bursting out of a bra top, shiny reddish hair, probably a wig, luscious Botox lips — and to anyone who’s been around Twitter, or the Internet, long enough, definitely “fake” looking. You know what I mean. Girls like this just don’t follow people like us in the real world. This girl doesn’t HAVE to work, she’s got an old man with lots of cash, or she makes a fortune modeling or stripping or escorting, etc. LOL
Where #2 might be the girl every guy marries, #3 is the girl every guy secretly wants that girl to be.
Unfortunately I can’t show you the photos or profiles. I don’t want to embarrass anyone involved — the people IN the profiles or those that followed them. Besides, the accounts are long gone now.
Just a few notes about the experiment itself:
- All photos and information were used WITH permission of their respectful owners.
- These three profiles were setup solely for this experiment and immediately deleted afterwards.
- No attempts were made to mislead people. We didn’t impersonate anyone. Each profile contained the same name — which was one of our company trademark names — and each Twitter handle was general, and in no way suggestive of a name or identity, male or female, with each derived from the same name, differentiated merely by a 1, 2, and 3. The Dude was given the 1, the average Girl was given the 2, and the Hot Girl, the 3.
- So far as the followees go, about half the people we followed were a cross-section of Twitter users. They included roughly the same number of men and women, primarily in the USA and Canada. Most were business people and organizations, followed by college students, and a mishmash of everyone else. We tried not to lean too far in one direction, but it seemed “business people” were everywhere.
- The other half of the profiles we followed were popular celebrities — actors, actresses, musicians — and major websites and brand names.
The Results
Within minutes of setting up these profiles, we saw exactly what we expected. The Hot Girl had 12 followers before we had even followed 100 profiles. The Average Girl and The Dude had 4 and 2, respectively.
By the time we had followed all 1,000 profiles — approximately 4 hours later — The Hot Girl already had 115 followers. The Average Girl had 23 and The Dude had 9.
Keep in mind, we never tweeted one tweet. All of the followers were just residual followers coming back from every profile we had followed. No tweets, no hashtags, no comments that could be searched, just raw, 100% organic follows and follow-backs.
The next day, exactly 24 hours later, The Hot Girl was up to 233 followers. The Average Girl was at 45, and The Dude had 17.
Two days later, the reciprocal following activity died off significantly. There were only marginal increases to The Hot Girl (237) and Average Girl (46), while The Dude remained at 17. By the third day, it all seemed to stop.
The final tally was:
- The Hot Girl: 237 followers
- The Average Girl: 46 followers
- The Dude: 17 followers
Hot Girl wins!
That’s a HUGE gap, considering all information was the same — and all profiles virtually identical, EXCEPT for the photo. But such is life. In the real world, the Hot Girl always gets WAY more attention, too. That goes without saying.
As expected, The Hot Girl’s followers were mostly men and businesses (190 of the 237) and the remainder appeared to be women or were undetermined. The Average Girl, by contrast, had a majority of female followers (30) and the rest were men, businesses, and undetermined. The Dude had ONLY men or business followers — although a couple of them may have been women-owned businesses. In fact, we’ll just go ahead and give him those two.
On that third day, after we gathered our data, we deleted all the profiles.
So what does this experiment prove?
First, that The Hot Girl earned approx. 13.9 followers to every 1 The Dude earned. Or better yet, The Hot Girl’s photo earned more than The Dude’s.
Second — no, it doesn’t prove how SHALLOW Twitter users can be (just like the rest of the Internet). We never said that! What it DOES prove is that if you want (or need) to build a foundation of Twitter followers FAST, simply use a Hot Girl avatar for the first few days, then switch it.
Third — most people would rather know an imaginary hot girl than an imaginary normal guy or average girl, but that goes without saying. We already knew that going into it.
Other than that, who cares what it proves?
If you want to get over that initial no-follower hump, and quickly build a profile that’s “presentable” so you can feel good about it — again, feeding the ego just enough, without starving the soul — then this is the fastest and easiest way to do it. No cost, no additional time or energy needed — all you need is a hot girl photo and permission to use it.
You can do this so long as you’re not misleading people into believing the profile belongs to this hot girl. There’s no rule that says what photo you have to use — you can use any photo you want in your profile. So long as the information is yours — it’s not your fault if potential followers only look at the photo and don’t read your profile before following you.
It’s totally legit.
It’s simply “padding” your profile with the inevitable bogus followers you’re bound to get anyway, but doing it all up-front to save face or whatever.
Add a sexy Twitter handle, and I’m willing to bet you’ll get TWICE as many followers in the same amount of time. Maybe try YourCompany69 or YourNameXXX — i.e., Widgets69, AcmeXXX, LOL! — you can always change the handle later, too.
Give it some action if you can — i.e., post a few tweets and retweet them from another established profile — and you’ll get even more followers, faster, guaranteed.
Bottom line, there’s no substitute for real, quality Twitter followers — and once you’re at a comfortable “starting” point, that should be your focus. In the mean time, however, you gotta do what you gotta do, and if this makes you feel better about your Twitter profile, so you can get out there and promote yourself with more confidence, then more power to ya.
— P.
Phil Autelitano is CEO of Mediarazzi — we develop TV channels and content for Roku and Connected TV. www.mediarazzi.com
@PhilAutelitano
