We said we could do it.
Here it is. A Twitter account with 10,000 followers in under 24 hours.
@10000in24
The exact figure is 10,523 followers in 7 hours, 21 minutes and 4 seconds.
Check it out.
But how did we do it?
How did we get 10,000 twitter followers in 24 hours? We clearly didn’t aggressively follow. Look at the follower to following ratio. So what magic trick did we employ to send that Twitter account follower counter spinning like a catherine wheel overnight?
No spam, no aggression, no ebooks, no Twitter methods.
The answer will be revealed later today along with the username and password for the @10000in24 Twitter account. The first person to log in and change the account gets to keep the account for their own use.
Eh, probably just followed a bunch of accounts that auto-follow back. Such an account is basically worthless.
Have you followed them first and they re-followed you.
@Wesley Wrong. If we only had 24 hours how did we manage to follow more than 1,000 people? Twitter has a limit. You are suggesting that we followed 10,000 people in 24 hours even though the number of people we followed is clearly under 4,000 and, even if we could have followed those 4,000 manually (which we didn’t) Twitter would have stopped us after the first 1,000.
You’ll have to think again I’m afraid.
To anyone else who thinks we did this by aggressive following, take a look at the numbers and think again.
Also remember that this is a trick… don’t look for the solution… look for the slight of hand…
Is the secret in the ‘Lists’?.. I still haven’t gotten around to checking them out.
@Jesse No, it’s nothing to do with the lists. Nice idea though. And we are pretty certain that lists could be used to artificially inflate a follower count. However, that is not what we have done this time. The lists are 100% irrelevant in this case.
As we said before… look for the trick. We haven’t been dishonest but there is deception at work here.
Here’s a clue… (and it’s a big clue…)
Imagine a magician with 2 cabinets. The glamourous assistant starts in one cabinet, resplendent in her sequined bikini. The magician waves his wand and then proceeds to insert swords into the cabinet containing the assistant.
And then, a few moments later, the assistant steps calmly out of the second cabinet wearing an equally beautiful ball gown.
The crowd goes wild…
We have done EXACTLY the same thing.
Wait what, this is just an account that you already had for several months or so.. It just had another name.
Then you simply made a new account with the name 10000in24. Earlier today you changed that name to something irrelevant, and changed the name of the old account to 10000in24.
If that is the trick it is no trick at all.
And confirmed, see http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=10000in24 — the account was created months ago; saturday march 6th..
Sure took you a while to figure out such an obvious trick, eh, Wesley :)
You started with an account that had the followers then just switched the usernames which made it appear that you gained 10,000 followers when you just moved them from one username to another.
That’s my guess.
So you had an account already with 10000 followers and then just renamed the account and waited 24 hours? Magically you now have a new account with 10000 followers.
Based on the way a magician would do that it would require a “look-a-like” or “Twin”. The user names are the same. As far as I can see the count and followers are legitimately there so no photoshop was used. Probably incredibly simple, I’m just not seeing it yet.
Yeah well, I didn’t expect you to do such a dumb trick. You made it appear like you found a flaw in twitter, yet you didn’t. You also said you “generated” 10,000 twitter followers, you didn’t. Those followers were already there.
Don’t get mad at me, dude. I didn’t do anything, if I had control over Upstart’s posts I’d be a whole lot more important around here than I am :).
Upstart Blogger, not to denigrate you or make you out to be any less than you are which is obviously a successful blogger (I like your posts) but I’m wincing at the misspellings in your posts and I thought bloggers were supposed to be accurate spellers.
Sorry dude. I guess I type too fast. I’ll keep an eye on it and try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
@Wesley I said it was a trick and I said it was a slight of hand trick. Whichever way you slice it that account got 10,000 followers in 24 hours. So what if it stole them from another account? It’s a trick for crying out loud!
I’ll admit that the language you used made me believe the account gained 10,000+ followers in 24 hrs. I also believed the trick was with a twitter flaw and not a trick on us…the readers looking for a possible, maybe legit, edge. Nice trick on us I suppose but useless in the marketing arena.
The only possible advantage for us, is the idea that we could buy the account of another person and change the name for our benefit. On that note it would hardly be worth anything because the “Followers” may be following for totally different reasons.
@Mr. B The thing to remember is that it was a trick. I said it was a trick from the outset and I always maintained that it wasn’t meant as a tutorial or method. It is just a trick and indicitive of the tricks used by people who try to inflate Twitter accounts in order to sell Twitter methods and, in some cases, the accounts themselves.
The account is, of course, absolutely worthless for anything other than bragging rights. If someone wants to be able to say they have 10,000 followers then it works. But apart from that it’s just a piece of junk.
Upstartblogger said: “I said it was a trick and I said it was a slight of hand trick. Whichever way you slice it that account got 10,000 followers in 24 hours. So what if it stole them from another account? It’s a trick for crying out loud!”
You didn’t get that account to 10,000 followers in 24 hours. The account stole followers from no one. It was simply renamed. The way Twitter accounts work is such that you can change your profile name as often as you like and keep your followers. That’s because each account has a unique id number associated with it. Much like how domain names are routed to their appropriate IP address via DNS servers. Domain names are merely a convenience for users. As far as the computers are concerned, the IP addresses are the real “names” of websites.
So it was a sleight of hand trick. But it was merely a trick to fool the audience, not a trick to game Twitter and gain 10,000 followers overnight. That is probably why the trick left a bad taste.
Fair point Dan. But we have been saying for a long, long time now that the internet marketing / make money online niche is nothing but one great big scam and showing the tricks that people use to inflate their Twitter accounts so that they can then sell Twitter methods was just a bit of fun.
Anyway, it’s all kind of academic now since our current obsession of featuring an inspirational (in terms of design or content or both) blog each day is proving to be very popular and, therefore, something that we intend to explore further.