Money Can Buy You Love On Twitter

MELISSA BLOCK, host: Earlier this week, the online gossip site Gawker reported that one of the GOP（Grand Old Party 美国共和党的别称）presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich, may have bought most of the 1.3 million followers of his Twitter account. Gingrich's campaign variously denies the accusation. But the controversy got us wondering if Twitter users can actually buy followers.

As NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports, they sure can.

HANSI LO WANG: Full disclosure, I have a Twitter account. How many followers? Zero, which can make you feel a bit inadequate when you're sized up next to Twitter heavyweights（要人，举足轻重的人） like Britney Spears with 8.8 million followers and Twitter mother monster herself, Lady Gaga with 12.2 million. Yes, I know I'm not a pop music sensation, but even NPR's very own...

SCOTT SIMON: I'm Scott Simon.

WANG: ...has more than a million followers. Still, fellow lonely Twitter users, don't fret. If your tweets aren't enticing enough fans, you can always pay Jake Schintgen to do the job. Schintgen is a co-owner of , an online service that's boosted Twitter follower counts for clients ranging from social media newbies, to celebrities, to...

JAKE SCHINTGEN: Major clothing lines launching a new product to Christian groups looking for a bigger outreach.

WANG: For a little less than $25, Schintgen says his company can take your Twitter follower count from zero to 1,000. And his biggest complaint so far from customers who go to his company's website?

SCHINTGEN: Speed. Often people think if I type my credit card number I get 2,000 followers in an hour.

WANG: Schintgen says that quick of a turnaround is impossible given Twitter's spam filters（垃圾邮件过滤器）.But fork over about $45 and his company will guarantee 2,000 followers in 20 to 30 days. How do they do it? Schintgen says promotes clients' Twitter accounts to other Twitter users with similar interests with the end goal of getting them to follow their clients.

If you're wondering if Schintgen's company has any competitors, there are plenty. Just Google the phrase: how to buy Twitter followers.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Here at uSocial, we know the secrets to making you an overnight rock star on Twitter.

WANG: And those secrets can cost you thousands of dollars if you want to go into really big numbers of followers- say, a few hundred thousand.

Peter Shankman advises companies on social media strategies. And he says the secret to gathering Twitter followers en masse begins with pinpointing the most common Twitter user, you know, the one that signs up for an account and then never tweets.

PETER SHANKMAN: People will reach out to these people and say: Hey, you know, if you start following this person, I'll give you a penny or I'll give you a coupon（礼券，优惠券）. Or follow these hundred people, I'll give you a dollar. A dollar's something of value to a lot of people, so they say, OK, this doesn't cost me anything. Click, click, click. They follow those people.

WANG: And Shankman says that payout to followers has a payoff for the client.
SHANKMAN: You get these really, really big numbers in your Twitter follower count. But they're useless numbers. You're speaking into an open cavern and no one's listening.

WANG: Although a large Twitter follower count might catch the eye of anyone who's trying to measure popularity. Newt Gingrich recently called attention to his Twitter account, saying he has six times as many Twitter followers as all the other current GOP presidential hopefuls combined. But Shankman says, numbers can be deceiving.

SHANKMAN: Ten years ago, it was the number of page views you had in your website. Thirty years ago, it was the subscription numbers you had, or the size or square footage of your house. But in the concept of Twitter, numbers only tell a very small part of the story.

WANG: And any legitimate Twitter story is built tweet by tweet.
 

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