Growth Hacking Experiment: The Human Bot

Chapter one of the Growth Hacking Experiment

The biggest buzzword on the block right now, growth hacking, has been taking Twitter and marketing by storm. Everyone, it seems, wants a growth hacker on their team or wants to be one. I've been intrigued by this concept for some time now and I'm diving deep. Welcome to iHuman's growth hacking experiment: the Human Bot.

Photo by Jennifer Morrow, Creative Commons License 

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking uses data analysis, social media, and other techniques to produce “exponential growth.” These are the guys and gals aiming for growth gone viral. Where traditional marketing produces growth over time, growth hackers want to strap rockets to the concept and build a gigantic audience in a short time.

The Experiment

For chapter one, I focused on my Twitter account (@NerdCred). I also focused on the low hanging fruit. I wanted to produce giant growth using the simplest and easiest methods. Throwing ethics out the window, I pursued quantity over quality. Most growth hackers decry these methods, however they're still used because of their modicum of success. What follows are my thoughts and results.

The Methods

Thousands of websites and Twitter accounts advertise adding followers to your account for a small fee. They promise “1k ACTIVE followers for $12.99!” or “2 THOUSAND followers in just a few days!” These are the guys I tried to emulate. How did they manage to build “active” followers in a short period of time?

Most of these services use bots to build a base of followers. Many use bot farms to add fake accounts to your following, but there are others that advertise active users. I wanted to see for myself how this worked. For the past week I became a human bot. Using the rule of reciprocity, I followed thousands of people in hopes they would follow me back.

I didn't follow accounts at complete random. There was a method to my madness. I had a plan. I would track down accounts that had a 1-2 following/follower ratio and follow all I could before Twitter's rate limits kicked in. Twitter has gotten smart to these tactics only allowing you to follow 1,000 people per day and also limits you to 2,000 total followers until you break a certain follower threshold. Thus in order to continually follow people, I also had to mass unfollow those that didn't return the follow.

Doing all of this work manually is just not worth it. In order to follow thousands of people I used this script for Google Chrome. (Ctrl-shift-J to open up chromes script editor.)

a = setInterval(function () {
  window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);
  $('.not-following .user-actions-follow-button.js-follow-btn').click();
}, 1000);

This script would follow everyone on a page, scroll, follow more people and so on. Allowing me to hit 1000 follow buttons in just a few minutes. The key to getting people to follow back was again looking for competitor accounts with a 1-2 ratio. In order to stop the script you just have to paste in the following.

clearInterval (a)

This little handy feature will cancel your mass following once you hit 1000.

As I said earlier, Twitter has rate limits and will prevent you from following more than 2000 accounts until you break a threshold. In order to leave room, after 18 hours I would perform a mass unfollowing.

In order to do this I used Crowdfire's nonfollowers option. Crowdfire provides a quick and easy way to unfollow anyone not following you. However, with the free version you're only allowed 100 unfollows per day. You have to pay for the service in order to do more.

Of course, this wasn't my only tactic. Remember, I wanted “active” followers. Mass following/unfollowing builds numbers but how do you build interaction on a large scale? The key came again through the power of human botting and the power of reciprocity.

By automating the favorite key, I was able to favorite hundreds of tweets in minutes. Again, people would see my action and tend to return the favor. This is the script I used to automate the process.

a = setInterval(function () {
  window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);
  $('.ProfileTweet-actionButton.js-actionButton.js-actionFavorite:visible').click();
}, 1000)

Again, to clear the script use:

clearInterval (a)

Twitter also rate limits favorites to 1000 per day. Research the hashtags you search for! I used Ritetag.com/ to track down the most used hashtags for my topics.

Using these methods I was able to skyrocket my followers. They're unethical and the lowhanging fruit but I wanted to experience the methods for myself.

The Results

How well did I do? For follower growth, I went from 412 followers to a whopping 2,404 followers (as of 23 May 15) in just 7 days. That's an add of almost 2,000 followers! I also received 156 more mentions as opposed to last month, along with 91 retweets, 96 link clicks, and 237 favorites. All in all, fantastic growth in the form of quantity.

During this time, I was also promoting my blog through the use of buffer.com and my Twitter. How did the blog look after this week of Twitter growth?

As you can see, I saw a large uptick in page views followed by a slow decline. I'm unsure at the moment if the decline is from the on coming weekend or something else. I'll be watching the data to figure it out.

Those were the positive results, but it doesn't paint the entire picture. For all the great interaction and followership I gained, I also received 276 DM's. None of them were personal. every single DM was an automated “Thanks for the Follow + link” message or a TrueTwit validation message. Through the process I also unfollowed 3,767 people. Twitter accounts were no longer people. They were just numbers to be manipulated.

I also HATED looking at my new twitter feed. It's become a depository for trash tweets, uninteresting content, and frankly a ton of spam. In order to escape the mediocrity of my feed, I became reliant on lists in order to shift through the content. No longer was I discovering cool new ideas through my feed. Instead, I focused on only the people I already new, ignoring the thousands of people now connected to my account.

Conclusion

I hated this method. I pride myself in building relationships and getting to know the people I interact with. This method of growth hacking (if you can call it that) completely dismembered that ability. I sacrificed quality for quantity. Reaping only the benefits of an increasing number attached to my account.

This is not the way to grow a following. I now have 2000 followers but no sense of community. I now have 2000 followers no new conversations. Growth is about building a community and a conversation, this experiment produced neither. Not to mention, this method completely disregards Twitter's own policies and I expect a suspension any day if I continue the “Human Bot” Method.

I would not recommend this to ANYONE. Not even those that care purely about quantity. The social proof of having 1000's of followers just isn't worth it.  

- Video by James Greenway (@NerdCred on Twitter)

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Make sure to view these other great articles at iHuman Development!

• Three Questions You Should Ask Yourself Everyday
• Journals: 5 Reasons You Should Start One Today
• I Want to Hijack Growth Hacking: or How Relearning to Tie My Shoes Changed My Life
• 8 Ways Your Brain Sabotages Your Life
• Don't Forget to Enjoy the Day!

Appendix: Interesting data from the experiment:

• I posted my LinkedIn account several times and never got a  connection, much less a profile view, even though I had a substantial following
• I received zero likes to iHuman's Facebook Page.
• Follower report analysis by SimplyMeasured
• Additional follower analysis via FollowerWonk
• Script Source via Karan Thakka