The Scandal
Mitt Romney has been accused of purchasing nearly 135,000 twitter followers this past weekend, July 20 through the 22nd. As anyone can clearly see if you check the followers added over the past weekend most of the accounts are dummy accounts. You can tell this because the accounts have very few followers themselves while only having one or two tweets. Further the majority of the followers all have generic profile photos, all of this evidence pointing to the fact that they are dummy accounts. There are many websites online that you can purchase twitter followers, youtube views, and other social media versions of ‘popularity’. Obviously Mitt Romney himself did not do this, however, one of his representatives could have easily purchased this massive twitter follower boost.
Why did Romney do it?
Whatever the reason was for his team to purchase this huge boost, President Obama still has a 16 million twitter follower lead. Perhaps it was just a faux boost to his popularity. Just to make it seem like he is more popular than he really is. To make it seem like people like him more so people will be more inclined to like him in the future. However, his team might be telling the truth when they say that they haven’t artificially boosted his twitter followers. Anyone can buy twitter followers for anyone else’s account, so it could realistically be pretty much anyone in the world with access to a computer. It does not make much sense to buy twitter followers. Even if you have 3 million followers and bought 2 million of those you are still reaching out to 1 million people no matter what. It just makes you look more popular than you actually are.
Social Media and SEO
Social Media plays a big role in the SEO industry. From twitter followers to Facebook shares. Many can easily play a role in the types of rankings that your website gets. Boosting your shares is a relatively uncommon tactic in the SEO world and is not well known yet. However, boosting your social media presence is always a good idea for your website looking to achieve good rankings, tons of page views, and boosting your time on site. Mitt Romney’s intentions might not have been backed by solid evidence but, we can always speculate. The reason that makes the most sense is he was just trying to boost his social media presence, nothing more, nothing less. There is literally no reason to have an extra 135,000 followers that aren’t really reading anything that you are tweeting about.
Nevertheless a good social media following is definitely a good stance to take when you are trying to boost your websites rankings and popularity. The best way to get someone to view your website is arguably through a friend of theirs telling them about your website. It’s a recommendation saying “Hey I like this site a lot, you should try it out. I’m sure that you would like this site as well.” It probably wouldn’t be put as awkwardly as that but you get the picture. Garnering a social media reputation can bring in loads of benefits to your website.
