“Quick buck artists come with every bull market. It’s the real [entrepreneurs] who know how to survive in the bear markets.”

John, your view and your LinkedIn threat with SEO expert Eric Bryant is very much appreciated.

Many companies without a large email database have issues jump starting their social campaigns, selling followers would be a good way to do this.

Of course on the other hand this could have a seriously damaging effect on the social medium. If I was placed on a list and sold to a company, then a third party app I subscribed to automatically made me follow a company I did not want to follow this would be an issue.

One of the advantages of Twitter right now is that it has not been tainted by the all mighty $ quite yet to too extreme of a degree. Of course you have companies spamming you with sales pitches, etc. but for the most part it is still a relatively clean social engine.

To sum up, buying followers has potential to be good for marketing, but bad for the average recreational user. Good post.

Thanks

But there might be a market for companies and advertisers, as there are markets for dealing with addresses and personal data already in the field of e-mail marketing and newsletters. Personally I don´t expect big business in this area. On top of that – Twitter should try to keep the service as clean as possible from spam, otherwise other services could make the race.

May be sponsoring of interesting and relevant persons could be a marketing idea which might work on twitter and other social media platforms for the future.