I’m taking a break from the website series to write about something that’s come up 3 times in the past week with existing and potential clients. There are a number of services out there that purport to increase your Twitter follower count exponentially (or at least logarithmically) just through using their software. My gut reaction to any of these services is abhorrence. They seem, on face, to completely miss the point and spirit of social media. You build your follower count through providing good, interesting, funny, or in some way useful content. Your stuff will be so awesome that your small group of followers will tell others and your count grows and grows. If you don’t have good stuff, or you don’t participate in your community, you wallow in obscurity.

But, as with most things in life, it’s not quite so black and white. The US Twitterverse alone is expected to cross 25million users in 2010, meaning that being found within that crowd is going to become harder and harder. People follow more and more folks, and unless you’ve already got a name, even your good content can get lost in the shuffle. One of the solutions, especially if you’re trying to use Twitter as a marketing channel, is to build a huge follower count knowing that some percentage of those people actually will see what you say. You can afford to only have 10% of your followers see what you write if you have 10,000 of them, right?

Most of these follower auto-generators sell themselves on that principle – you need a big following, so pay us money to get one for you! With varying degrees of accuracy and targeting, they work by following other twitterer’s followers. Going on the theory that 50% of people automatically follow anyone who follows them, if the software can follow 500 people per day for you (without tripping Twitter’s spam filters), that’s 250 new followers every day – bingo!

Like I said, my first reaction is to go running away from these damn spam bots. This isn’t growing my list organically, this is gaming the system. It’s just not right!

But life isn’t that cut and dried. What if the software followed the followers of your competitors? Sure, that might be a bit bold, but if they’re interested in what your competition has to say, won’t they be interested in you? What if you could target keywords, so the software picked people that were clearly interested in what you have to say? In a way, you are actually doing them a service, assuming you have something to write about. After all, what good is a storefront on Broadway if you don’t have a sign out telling people what you do!?

In the end, it all comes down again to having a plan for posting content, interacting with the community, and being useful. If you can’t do that, beating AplusK’s follower count won’t do you the slightest bit of good. So, build yourself a plan, write some great stuff, and if you buy yourself some followers, I promise not to gag reflexively.