Trending on Twitter: What’s It Worth?

My last Twitter Party topic trended on Twitter for a little while and I was thrilled. I shouted from the rooftops, my party guests cheered and my client was ecstatic. And it was real.

We may have had a little Twitter luck shining on us, but we also worked our butts off for it. I promoted the party all over Twitter, asked friends with giant followings to retweet the invitation, created a Facebook invitation, told everyone I knew, and got people engaged in a great party that got them tweeting up a storm. Bingo.

But what if you could buy the tweets and retweets you’d need to make you trend? What if you looked at all the other trending topics that same day and realized they werent’t working as hard as you were – they had just bought their way to the top of the list?

Turns out that’s happening more than you knew. Unless you’d also read this article in the Wall Street Journal called Inside a Twitter Robot Factory, like I did, in which case you do already know. According to that piece, celebrities and politicians have been buying followers for quite a while. Tubefilter agrees, with this article about Fame for Sale on Twitter & Youtube.

One of the most interesting aspects of this is Twitter’s seeming indifference to the fake accounts. I know Facebook is strict about the fake accounts – or even the business accounts used as personal ones. But it seems like Twitter considers it a non-issue. I wonder if that will remain true or if all this attention will force them to address the issue.

Is it true that you’re doing it wrong if you haven’t bought followers? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.