Can Your Twitter Account Be Banned From Purchasing Followers?

Purchasing Twitter followers has become a hot topic recently, with news sites and blogs focusing in on whose following is “real” and whose isn’t. Of course the statement from Twitter HQ is that buying and selling followers is not allowed, but how much does Twitter really care about buying followers?

The answer seems to be not much, with only egregious violators getting banned. Of course when the case of someone’s 1,000,000 fake followers becomes a topic of media attention, Twitter HQ steps in to lay down justice, but Twitter is notorious for letting 99% of these cases easily fly under the radar; even if the media notices a buyer, Twitter has been known to turn a blind eye. This is true for the account of a lobbyist group which was called out last year for trying to buy “supporters” for their cause. The account’s follower numbers went up by 40,000 overnight right before any major political event. One year later and the account is still going strong.

Louis Mensch’s fake followers became news that swept the nation

Why Buy Followers?

Political buyers are common in the Twitter world. People want their cause or position to seem popular, so they add followers constantly. But there are other reasons that normal users buy followers on Twitter. The most common way to get a follower is to follow someone. When the person sees a new follower, they hopefully come over and check out the Twitter feed of that follower. If they like it, they follow back. However, this doesn’t always work. When you follow a person, often they don’t follow back or even notice.

Many long-time Twitter users think they have all the feeds they want, and will only follow your Twitter feed if it offers something interesting. But for them to get to the feed, they first see the number. There are three numbers that every user sees before getting to your feed. They are titled “Tweets,” “Followers,” and “Following.” If any of these numbers are unbalanced, it makes an impression. For example, celebrities usually have thousands of followers, but don’t follow anyone. So having a lot of followers may make a user look “cool.”

Many people have noticed that after buying followers, nearly everyone they followed followed back. This is important because you can only follow a certain number of people without a following. Twitter allows users to follow up to 2,000 accounts, but after that the user must attract more followers in order to follow more accounts. Buying followers is one way to do this, and evening out the followers vs following ratio actually makes your account less likely to be banned. This means that follow-backs are the gold of the Twitter world, and increasing follow-back ratio is how accounts get off the ground. Once real users are viewing tweets, retweeting, and favoriting an account, the effect is contagious. The new followers attract more and more followers, with no further work on the user’s part.

A Little Thing Called “Perceived Value”

Following users and getting follow-backs is necessary to get started on Twitter, but without buying followers the numbers can become unbalanced again. A user who is following hundreds of people, yet has few followers himself, looks desperate. The impression is that such a user must have a boring feed, be annoying, or an advertiser. At worst, the user looks like a follow bot and can actually be banned. Twitters T.O.S. states that they do not allow aggressive following. This is where buying followers can help. A natural Twitter account usually has roughly equal numbers under followers and following. A slight bias toward more followers marks an interesting feed, which will get more users to check out your account. Also, this will not get your account banned as the numbers will simply look normal.

However, the number of tweets also plays into this. If an account has very few tweets but thousands of followers, and isn’t a celebrity, it looks a bit strange. Users who know about buying Twitter followers will understand this abnormality, while other users will just be confused. Either way, make sure to actually post content. It probably won’t get your account banned, but it won’t help with gaining real followers either. An active, interesting account is still the best way to gain a following. Buying followers gets people to look at the account, but having a good feed gets them to follow it.

What is Twitter Doing About It?

Twitter just isn’t interested in searching out buyers to ban them. Buying followers doesn’t hurt Twitter in any way, so they have no incentive to stop it. Finding buyers takes time and money, plus it is much easier to ban the sold account than the buyer. Sellers are much easier to spot and ban than buyers. This is because often shady sellers have hundreds of accounts they manage all from one computer. This results in 200 accounts having the same I.P. address, which sends a huge red flag to administrators. This is actually how most bans happen; someone is caught juggling multiple accounts, all of which are suspicious. Luckily, people who buy Twitter followers generally only have one or two accounts, which doesn’t send out the same alarms. And no, Twitter does not ban accounts simply for being on the “following” list of a banned user.

What raises a flag is when a huge percentage of an account’s followers are suddenly banned. However, if buyers stick with reputable services the chances of that go down drastically. A backroom deal with a random user is the type that usually goes south. The small sellers are the ones doing it DIY style with the 200 fake accounts and one computer or I.P. address. The worst dealers use follow bots. These are a program to automatically have hundreds of accounts follow a user with no need for the seller to even log in. This is also the riskiest type of follower, because the bots never post or log in. They merely follow user after user, looking very suspicious.

Finding a reputable large dealer is the best guard against that, because the company knows what it’s doing and has experience at avoiding the bans. Sites like ours are great because the users are real – not just follow bots. Using a reputable service, the followers will have pictures, posts, and active accounts; indistinguishable from your average “tweeter”. When you buy from a reputable dealer, the risk goes of having your account banned goes down to zero.