For our community management clients, we often check who’s following competiting or related businesses on Twitter to see if there’s anyone who might be a good fit for us to engage with on behalf of that business. After all, if you like one local brewery or Grandview Heights neighborhood business, it’s probable you’ll be interested in discovering more!

While searching through one such business’ followers today, I found something pretty amusing. And by “amusing” I mean “upsetting because someone is charging for this and calling it social media marketing.”

Aside from the fact that the usernames are all random letters and numbers, the bios are all generated from the same word pool. Either that, or there are a LOT OF PEOPLE WHO LIKE BACON AND ZOMBIES AND GURUING.

There were hundreds more but after a few dozen my screenshot hand got tired.

Spam bots randomly follow everyone on Twitter. Hundreds of spam bots from the same generator do not randomly follow one account at the same time. Someone is passing this off as a service and promising “more followers on Twitter.”

Sigh.

A thousand fake followers do absolutely nothing to help market your business.