So, yeah – this is a little embarrassing isn’t it? I can see how this might look – social influence CEO buying social influence? Good spot by Milo at The Kernel and his moles. Looking back on it, as an ex-journalist I would have been pleased with the scoop myself.
If only I could claim that I’d been as nefarious and cunning as to try to trick THE WORLD about my twitter influence. Short story – I happily bought followers from Fiverr in March or April – to demonstrate it could be done and to show people in the office that it wouldn’t affect core PeerIndex rankings.
And it didn’t. Well actually it went up a little, and we changed the algorithm, job done – I can’t speak for what happens with other systems when you try this sort of thing.
Any other benefits? Well I had 14,000 fake glossy porn stars listening to my every word so guess I had short-term pornfluence. As it turns out, twitter is pretty efficient at deleting these glossily avatared lovelies anyway – about 8-15 accounts per day by my calculations.
It is no secret that I’ve spoken about how easy it is to buy followers in public and to clients – to point out how having marketing KPIs which are simply accumulating followers are silly. Because for $5 you can hit your target. Targets for social media teams need to be real business targets not gameable numbers like follower counts or likes.
The moral of the story is three-fold. One – PeerIndex works. It could largely, spot that my influence wasn’t real. Two – don’t use your own account to test your theories (especially when you’re CEO of a social influence company). Three – don’t use follower accounts as a marketing KPI. They’re not only meaningless, they are – as I have just found – potentially embarrassing.
Azeem Azhar
CEO - PeerIndex