The Advanced Twitter Marketing System is a powerful method of legally and ethically building a large targeted following on Twitter and making great leaps in your list building and online profits while you’re at it. How powerful is a big targeted Twitter following?
So powerful that at least one enterprising entrepreneur, popular voiceover artist Todd Gross, has created and built Twitter accounts to then offer them for auction on eBay – here’s a screenshot of his offering there today. In the interest of complete transparency, let me state upfront that to the best of my knowledge Todd is NOT using my Advanced Twitter Marketing System in his efforts.
So why bring it up then? First, because this is a new type of commerce regarding Twitter, and I want to keep you abreast of any and all forms of Twitter marketing I see, good or bad. Second, to consider the implications of this activity, and why I think this could be both harmful and possibly even illegal in my non-legal-professional opinion. And third, to just sort of smile that people would bid over $100 for this account at eBay, when for $47 they could learn the Advanced Twitter Marketing System and have an account that size of their own – in fact one for every niche they market to, in less than a month, and be able to continue building those using the same techniques. 
Let’s look again at the implications of this new endeavor, and some possible ramifications should it start to catch on… Remember that I’m not a lawyer or other licensed legal professional nor do I have a business relationship with Twitter, eBay or Todd Gross, so these are just personal observations and opinions and nothing more or less than that, ok?
1) As Twitter was intended to be used, users sign up to follow those people they want to follow. Those are the only people whose tweets they recieve, allowing them to target their reading on Twitter to specific areas of interest. So my first question has to be are they signing up to follow the account or the person? Since it seems to me they’re following the PERSON, then anyone else sending from that account might have their tweets considered SPAM, as happens when a marketer sells people’s e-mail addresses without prior permission. Have we just got a better handle on that area only to see it raise it’s head on Twitter?
2) Who owns the Twitter accounts in question? Sure, you start and build your Twitter account – but doesn’t it and everything else on the site still belong to Twitter? And if so, What are the potential legal ramifications from selling something you don’t own?
3) Social networking for business purposes involves building your reputation amongst your followers as a provider of great information, tools, tips and resources. As a result, they trust your suggestions that much more and are much more likely to follow your links to build your lists or increase your sales or affiliate marketing results. You have no such relationship developed with an account you just bought, and in the time you can win them over you could have built your own account from the ground up using your own Twitter account and applying the Advanced Twitter Marketing techniques.
4) A sudden change of ownership in an account you’re following might allow unscrupulous parties to suddenly use that trusted account to send their followers banned materials like porn, warez, hate material or virii. These same people have used every new technology to try and offend/affect others, so why wouldn’t they be trying to use Twitter too? And while Biz Stone and his excellent Twitter team would shut them down fast, who knows what damage would already have been done, especially with all the RSS aggregators that publish people’s tweets on websites and blogs too?
5) Will Twitter users create a backlash against such practices? There are still a lot of head-in-the-clouds Ivy-League-Oldtimers who feel the Internet should be devoid of all marketing, ignoring the fact that the funding for most of the ‘net wouldn’t exist without the hosting, domain name, autoresponder, ISP, etc, fees paid every month by marketers with ever-growing presences on the Internet. On Twitter this is a non-issue – you create your own ‘Twitterverse’, seeing only the tweets of those you choose to follow. So the ignorant and unenlightened can follow just those of their own ilk just as easily as the rest of us can follow brilliant, forward-thinking individuals. But when an account changes hands, who knows what they might send, and to whom?
6) Even if you want to use Twitter exactly as it’s meant to be used and send your new followers exactly what they want from you, how can you do that if you’re not aware of how they were enticed to follow the account – especially if it’s not the type of tightly-targeted following you learn to build in your Advanced Twitter Marketing training?
7) Will Twitter even allow this practice? I assume they’ve already banned some individuals from using the system, unscrupulous types who would lovew to see this catch on so they could just keep buying accounts to keep ahead of Twitter and keep spamming it’s users. There’s already talk of Twitter finding a way to verify each account is legitimate, i.e. owned by the people they claim to be, and this might just pose another issue along similar lines. What if you paid $100, $200 or even $500 for a large Twitter account, just to have it shut down the next day – possibly even for activities before you bought the account?
If, between the Twitter user base and the owners of Twitter, a system could be found that kept the above concerns in check, then another profitable area of outsourcing will emerge that benefits both marketers and those who would become expert at building new Twitter followings – much like those who specialize in building sites or blogs and then selling them online. Perhaps some sort of marker or ID-extension would differentiate these accounts, so users didn’t follow them unknowingly.
So will Twitter users see Todd as an innovator, blazing the trail to new online profit centers or as someone caught trying to scam the system? Each will have to decide that on their own, based on their own pre-conceived notions of what Twitter is and/or should be, and on any decisions on the matter handed down by Biz Stone & his Twitter crew. In the final analysis, let’s remember it’s their site and their system, so they do and should have the final say on everything Twitter.
My personal feeling at this time is that users of my Advanced twitter Marketing System stay with starting and building their own Twitter accounts, keeping them tightly focused to just those followers who are truly interested in you, your tweets and your products and affiliate offerings. If the practice of building and selling Twitter accounts is generally approved of and officially condoned as time goes on, I’ll add a chapter on how to use Advanced Twitter Marketing tactics on the accounts you buy, since the system has been shown to help everyone from newbies just starting out to big dogs who already have large followings on Twitter. But until then my personal feeling is that it’s better to adopt a wait-and-see attitude toward this new practice, and keep building your own legitimate followings in each of your target niches until then, using the tried-tested-and-true Advanced Twitter Marketing strategies.
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