Australian marketing company uSocial, which ambitiously (if inaccurately) describes itself as “the world’s premier advertising service,” is offering to find Twitter users new followers for money. $87 will supposedly get you a thousand new followers; $372.75 will get you ten thousand; $3479 will get you an army of 100,000 new fans. The company’s site doesn’t seem to have much in the way of explanation of how it finds followers, but a BBC story on the service says that uSocial identifies Twitter users whose interests seem to line up with that of the uSocial customer in question, then shoots them a message inviting them to follow the customer. It’s up to the prospective follower to decide whether he or she wants to follow or not.
It sounds innocuous in theory, but uSocial’s cheesy Web site doesn’t inspire confidence. Nor does its claim that Twitter followers are worth a dime a month per follower. That’s probably true for some companies that market on Twitter, but it must vary wildly. I’m just short of 10,000 followers myself, and I know I’m not realizing a grand a month from them—even indirectly through ads on Technologizer displayed to people who found the site through Twitter. Which is just fine, since I’m not in it for the dough.