An Australian company is selling Twitter follower packages

Jul 3, 2009 10:46 GMT  ·  By

Everyone wants to be on Twitter these days – celebrities, brands, companies, even your average Joe wants to make it big on the hottest online property at the moment. But how exactly do you achieve success, measured by the number of followers obviously? You could, of course, write useful, interesting content and hope that the word will spread. But that takes too long and what if you don't really have anything to say? Well, you could start following people left and right in the hope they'll follow you back. But what if you can't even be bothered to do that? Thankfully, there is a solution, as Australian company uSocial has launched a new service guaranteeing followers, for a small fee of course.

Starting from $87 for 1,000 followers and moving up to the deluxe package with 100,000 followers, it looks like the company has a solid business model. Some might argue that “selling” followers could be considered, say, objectionable, but they'd be wrong as the service is actually beneficial to Twitter users. The company uses a system to match users to its customers by searching for those who might be interested in whatever it is that its customers are offering. When a match is found users will be asked if they would like to follow that Twitter account. So you see, it's not spam.

uSocial already has 150 customers, according to BBC, and says that a further 80-90 are in talks to use the service. Its customers are as diverse as they come, with educational organizations, companies, marketing firms and even individual yoga instructors signing up for the product. The company also estimated that a Twitter follower was worth about 10 cents per month for an enterprise, though precise methodology for the measurement was not provided.

With Twitter growing at a lighting-fast rate and the company still not making any money and providing no real business plan for the future, it's good to see that at least some companies are making money from the service, be it through more traditional means, or via innovative services like uSocial's.