Buy yourself some Twitter followers? I sense scam..

Recently, some discussion around this was brought up by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and I took great interest after reading more information on uSocial.  They make large promises to deliver a certain number of followers in a certain number of days.  At a cost.  Their biggest promise is 100, 000 followers in 365 days for a minor $3,479 (normally $4,970).  That is an incredible increase from an account that has no followers up to even a few thousand.

The first alarm was the simple fact that uSocial themselves only have ~15, 500 followers at the time of writing this posting.  (They also claim 18,000 in their online propaganda which leads me to think they lost massive followers when Twitter removed bots.)  Then, they are following back all 15k which I bet most are the same bots that are driving their numbers. How can they guarantee you will have that many followers when the company themselves is not able to meet that claim?

It leads me to believe that most of what you are purchasing are bots or other accounts that are not true humans as we would hope when engaging such a service.  What kind of business ROI would we get from a bunch of bots?  Who guarantees the actual results?  How long will these followers stay? Where is the interaction? How do you get feedback or is anyone there to even click on your blog posting links or product information.

The second part is that they offer the service to push your product, 3 times per day for a month, to their followers.  I am not sure how many of us follow accounts just to get advertisements.  Having one here and there from the person that owns the account pitching their own goods is expected and I take no offense.  Having a feed of all ads?  How productive is that?  Plus, if most of their followers are bots, who are you really reaching?

Summary – buying followers is not economical nor helpful.  Building great products or having something important to say will grow your base.  That or buy your way onto the Suggested User List (SUL).  A sure guarantee to add followers. A tight community of thousands is far better than a loose collection of tens of thousands.

Do You Poken?

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  • timanderson

    Hi there,

    A bit of feedback from a 'user' of usocial.net.

    We are a British company that used usocial.net to buy 1000 ‘fans’ for a newly created Facebook page (I Love Skiing)
    for around ~£120, more out of curiosity than anything. Due to the nature of the Facebook page I wasn't concerned about being duplicitous, after all, I didn't expect anyone to be coerced into joining a fansite that they were disinterested in.

    The campaign was superficially successful, with a large influx of fans joining. However, despite telling usocial.net that we are UK based and wished to have UK based fans (which they ask for), the fans we gained were all American. So while we gained pure numbers, we diminished our relevance and simply wish we hadn’t bothered.

    I hope this helps.
    Tim
    Skiing Holidays Ltd

  • carnagein

    Excellent article, I purchased 5000 twitter followers from http://www.socialkik.com and they delivered them sooner than promised, that made a huge positive impact on my online business ! I started receiving more customers and better conversion rate because of the big number of followers which enhanced my reputation ! I highly recommend them : http://www.socialkik.com

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  • Amiee

    DO NOT USE SOCIALKIK.COM THEY ARE A SCAM!! They DO NOT DELIVER AND THEN DISSAPPEAR WITH YOUR MONEY.
    Now I can't get them to email me back. These people who have posted this same message on top of mine work for them. Its an obvious cut and paste! BEWARE!

  • Brad

    Is that true? I was thinking of buying views for my youtube video but maybe I won't. You pay socialkik through paypal right? If you do, you should file a dispute on paypal. It could put them completely out of business. I've seen it a few times.

  • Larry

    Amiee, which competitor of Socialkik.com do you work for?

    I personally don't work for Socialkik.com, but after seeing so many bloggers writing great reviews about Socialkik.com, I started using them myself and I'm quite satisfied.
    They always answer emails within the same day and they even have a phone number on their Contact us page… so I really don't know how you can't get hold of them.

    Here are some examples of what LEGIT bloggers are saying about Socialkik.com:

    http://adogy.com/socialkik
    http://zacjohnson.com/buy-twitter-followers
    http://www.nethosting.com/blog/?p=348

    On top of this, Socialkik.com uses Paypal, so it impossible for them to disappear with your money because you can simply dispute it with Paypal if they didn't deliver.

  • Larry

    I have a strong feeling that “Amiee” is noting but a drone sent by uSocial to dirty up the name of their cheaper competitor, Socialkik.com … read my reply to “Amiee” above.

    You made a good point, the fact that Socialkik.com only uses Paypal and they're still growing like crazy according to Alexa, simply means that no one is filing paypal disputes against them, because they must be doing a great job at delivering the work. :)

  • Bookmaker

    Hey, here is my page (http://www.twitter.com/bookmakeraz), i have payed for 2500 followers on twitter, but socialkik don't even answer my emails, so i think they are scma. Be aware!

  • ProSocialmediaxpert

    hello evry1, i am really wondering that people are so happy paying 139$ for 1138 fans..

    i am a social media expert and have been delivering at an unbelievable rate of 100 fans per 5$.

    all genuine, real and active

    you can also see my review here

    http://www.fiverr.com/users/tekkguy/gigs/get-yo…

    i am super fast and take orders upto 200k fans….

    forget all these sites.. i am just the best!!!!

  • Guest

    hi, could you email me at nyomwega@yahoo.com? i'd be interested in hearing more of your service. your url is “no longer available”.

  • Meeksainc

    I recently purchased 5000 followers from unlimitedtwitterfollowers.com and thus far have had a very positive experience! Has anyone else used them? They seem to be courteous as well as professional in e-mails

    Mike Cannon

  • http://twitter.com/GetTIRS TIRS

    Whe shall see. I just plunked down $50 to check it out for @GetTIRS for our http://www.tirs.us site to see if it's real or not. Personally I am a skeptic but I'm willing to try it out for $50.

  • mark

    i agree with amiee,

    10 days after we submitted our order for 2000 targetted fans
    - no response from socialkik to our enquiries
    - addition of 14 non targetted fans (not of the country we wanted)

    however, i will check what larry said below and see what paypal can do for us. i dunno if we are eligible for buyer protection though…

  • Rocky

    I am not sure if Socialkik does actually have the capability to produce that many fans as they have stated. I was just curious and skeptic. And wow! I found on a Pakistan based job board a big notice posted by socialkik that they are looking for data entry people to help them get 50000 fans for some of their clients pages. And similar posts for developing facebook applications etc. This is amazing.
    http://j.imagehost.org/view/0661/socialkick5

  • Andy

    I agree with you but from my personal experience, it bought 4000 Facebook fans from http://www.socialkik.com and they added them to my page in a little over 1 month. All the fans appeared to be real and some of them turned out to be great customers.
    You should use http://www.socialkik.com to buy Facebook fans… we purchased 10,000 Facebook fans and we're quite satisfied with the results. It's completely legal because the fans are real and they don't join your page until they check it and find it interestings. Socialkik.com keeps sending suggestions to become a fan until the order is fulfilled.

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  • Doctor_feelgood

    Socialkik is a total scam. Purchased advertising from them, nothing happened. Then purchased advertising through facebook and got a ton of new fans, which socialkik then tried to take credit for. I went through the Paypal resolution system and they lost, and now they are threatening to get facebook to cancel my page, and send everything to a bill collector. Quite the service, they are.

  • Ameenia

    I started a website recently and purchased 10,000 Facebook fans from http://www.socialkik.com for our Facebook page and the results were amazing! I passed all my competitors when it comes to the number of Facebook fans… some competitors have been in business since 1999, but now we have 20 times more fans than them on Facebook, which made it seem that I've been in business much longer than them ! they are providing real fans. you should contact with them.

  • jeff5

    yeah, not a big fan of any of these services, especially socialkik.com. it took a lot longer to deliver the followers, many of them stopped following right away. in general, trying to pay for followers, friends, etc, is just not effective in the long run

  • Mcquade

    Wow. I always figured that there must be some group of people in a foreign country just clicking away. At least they're asking for legit people. But still, not a clean and trustworthy way to get real users. Scratch socialkik off my list…

  • shawn

    Completely agree. My company used socialkik not too long ago to underwhelming results. I wouldn't go as far as some posters here to say that they are a scam, but if you are seriously looking for active and engaged followers and friends, then you'll have to get them the old fashioned way, earn them.

  • gelson

    r u sure thats same socialkik??? spelling not same. i was hopng to use them, but now do not trust socialkik

  • netwerkwonk

    Paying is okay, just depends on what you need the followers for. If you are looking to boost numbers and show off how many friends you have, then it's a great route to go. I've never used socialkik though and won't, given that they only process payments through Paypal. Maybe they're ok, but I've had too many issues with paypal. Plus, it's a telling sign that they don't have their own payment processing function.

  • Samnedworthy

    ok, what's the facebook fan page? and how bout posting something on the wall to prove you control the page – I don't believe it for a minute.

  • Luckvillage

    After 7 days not a single fan. Emailed them and no answer. Just went to PayPal resolution system.

  • Anonymous

    I’ve had bad luck with both uSocial and SocialKik. I think SocialKik especially is an outright scam – I got zero fan growth and nobody from SocialKik would even respond to my emails. I had to go to PayPal to dispute the charge.

  • Archd

    The comments by Ameenia and possibly others on this page seem to have been written by socialkik employees. The exact same comment with minor modifications is written here: http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showpost.php?p=538538&postcount=172

  • Louella

    URGENT WARNING: DO.NOT.USE.SOCIALKIK.EVER.
    SocialKik is an absolute scam. I read all the positive forum reviews and now believe (as someone else suggested above) that the positive referrals are posted by SocialKik themselves. I paid for 1,000 FB Likes and a few days later, faceless Facebook fans with empty profiles and no profile image started appearing in the hundreds as Likes on our FB page. The looked immediately suspicious so I promptly deleted them. For weeks now, I have been deleting an influx of hundreds of fake IDs daily. Even worse, after making a complaint to SocialKik, the influx temporarily died down and I started receiving what seemed like legitimate Likes from real users, only to realise that some of the names doubled up exactly with different profile images but virtually identical profiles. In other words, within a preview of 6 or so Likes on our FB page, two full names were identical and total scams. Ridiculous! All of my supposedly real Facebook users happen to be from Austin, Texas and have EXACTLY the same taste in music. If you are going to fake FB IDs at least get creative about it so it seems legitimate. I complained and complained via email to SocialKik and requested that they STOP this process which was bound to do more harm than good to our reputation on FB. I totally regret using them. I thought the worst that might happen is that I might only get 50 genuine Likes despite their guarantee claims but this ongoing issue of fake IDs is WAY WORSE. It’s like a virus I can’t stop. I would have rather built a few hundred genuine FB Likes more slowly that waste time and money on this SCAM. Hilariously, after one of my complaints SocialKik claimed that they were limited in how they could help build my genuine user Likes without me granting them access as an administrator to my Facebook page. Can you believe it?? As if I’d grant these scammers administrator access!
    REPEAT: DO.NOT.USE.SOCIALKIK.EVER.

  • SW

    @Andy is a fake comment. The exact same comment is found here: http://seo.tv/socialmedia/hitwise-top-10-most-visited-social-networking-websites.html

    It is probably a socialkik employee

  • http://www.joesdaily.com JoesDaily

    Yeah I’d recommend never to use these services. They will get you nothing but bots. If you think about it, does it really surprise you?

  • Headwise Net

    I recommended never to use these services and will get nothing bots. Socialkik especially is an outright scam and i got zero fan growth nobody from socialkik would even to my emails.

    http://www.headwise.net

  • http://faceandtweets.com/get-twitter-followers-retweets/ Extremeblogpress

    Buying twitter followers is Not a scam. You can get geo-targeted followers who ca really be of interest to you be cause of their location, infact you can get a freelancer who can “buy” followers for you using targeted keywords

  • Dsa

    SHIT SERVICE OF http://www.socialkik.com NO ANSWERS OF EMAILS. WILL CLAIM A PAYPAL DISPUTE AGAINST THIS SCAM COMPANY!

    THEY ADD FAKE_FACEBOOK ACCOUNT TO YOUR FANPAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    KIK SOCIALKIK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • Nathan

    Socialkik worked great for many of my clients, they have always delivered on their campaigns and they’ve got the lowest rates for fans and followers.

  • http://www.alterpride.org/ Randall Krause

    BEWARE! SOCIALKIK IS A SCAM. I purchased 1000 targetted Facebook fans and 1000 targetted Twitter followers. They delivered my Facebook order promptly, altho I suspect all the fans were bots. But I got absolutely nothing for my Twitter order. My support requests were only answered within the first week, claiming my campaign was “processing”. But now eight weeks later, after the PayPal dispute window has closed they don’t reply at all to my requests. Apparently they are going out of business? What a waste of time and money! Stay away from Socialkik!

  • http://www.fanpagelikes.net buy facebook likes

    I recommended this as facebook follower. This is very interesting….

  • Justin

    Socialkik.com is a complete scam. They sent completely fake profiles – some with even the same profile picture. I am disputing with Paypal, have posted on ripoffreport.com, and have sent a report to the FTC.

  • Anonymous

    I too had a horrible experience with SocialKik. Their customer service is HORRIBLE. I’ve sent about a dozen emails to them and not one of them were replied to. I haven’t used many other services but I recently used Chirpature.com and they were great!

    As stated on their About Page, they’re a fairly small business and really do focus on customer satisfaction  I would really recommend them!

  • Jbender

    Beware, this site is a scam.  They claim to give you real people that choose to like your page.  When you start reviewing each profile that has liked your page you will notice they are not typical of any facebook profile you would be accustomed to seeing.  In fact, each one I clicked on, does not allow you to add as a friend and each one’s wall status states thier last update was a changed profile picture.  It is a waste of money.  I have requested a refund from Socialkik only to be given the run around that their technical department is looking in to it.  I have escalated my claim to Paypal’s resolution center.

  • Thoang4

    I can’t believe socialkik still exists. I filed several claims couple months ago. To potential users; DO NOT USE Socialkik. Kaye, if you read my email, I need my $ 600 back for all the services you guys did not do as promised since August 13th. I need my REFUND.

  • pokaren

    I’ve had bad phenomenon with both uSocial and SocialKik. I reckon SocialKik especially is an unqualified cheat – I got correct fan development and nobody from SocialKik would steady move to my emails.

    buy cheap facebook fans

  • micon

    I went finished the Paypal deciding system and they mislaid, and now they are threatening to get facebook to declare my page, and publicise everything to a saw gatherer. Quite the conjugation, they are.

    buy twitter followers