Like others, I’m interested in keeping up with how businesses are using Twitter and what benefits they accrue. So was keen to read a recent article on this theme penned by international property consultancy Drivers Jonas Deloitte, DJD for short. After a bit of a struggle to find DJD’s Twitter page (they forgot to tell us in the piece), I noticed that the firm had a seemingly impressive number of followers (1100+). Curiosity is something I’m not short of so I delved a bit deeper. As I saw some of the followers’ profiles, the article comment describing Twitter as‘a watering hole at which to meet potential clients’ came back to me in a flash, but not in the sense originally intended: several of them were obvious porn peddlers.

Credit: photo courtesy Steve Punter at Flickr

So, either DJD doesn’t realise (did it bulk-buy followers?), it doesn’t care (someone at the firm must have manually accepted these follows), or it has no company policy for who can follow its corporate Twitter site. I found the same situation with another company I encountered recently. In that case, the firm had clearly bought the bulk of its followers. You could tell because there was a distinct over-representation of micro-businesses in Wales, despite the fact that the firm in question has no business or operations in that country, is based in London and it sells to a different scale of company entirely. I advise anyone who wants to avoid this kind of situation to read Michael Kristof’s and Chad Engle’s excellent content here

P.S. After writing this I came across this related post by Adrian Short about the unintended reputational consequences of using Google AdSense on your corporate website