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Does anyone else feel a little uneasy about the "Twidium" tool mentioned in the article? They find auto-following bot accounts and follow them to boost your follower count. Sounds like typical dirty SEO that doesn't really create any value [1]. Wouldn't it be better to genuinely add some value with your product (and thus your Twitter feed)?

[1] http://www.twidiumapp.com/accounts_list.htm

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Twidium is a bit of a skeevy looking tool, I must admit. So far, we've only used it to follow people who have specifically put certain keywords in their tweets or bios, and it has worked well in helping us finding highly engaged consumers. Have you tried using it?

I haven't had cause to, but I would be afraid that if Twitter implements some sort of PageRank-style spam detection, my account would be sucked into the great cleanup if I'm following a lot of bots.

The "Follow All" bot strategy seems to be an optional package you can buy. We didn't even know about it until your comment, so it seems to be that you'd be fine as long as you don't opt in to that particular strategy.

Mass-following based on keywords is the same as spamming.

Twitter used to forbid automatic following (except for automated follow-back), but I suspect they don't care now - the more people filling it with spam and junk the busier they look when selling promoted trends.

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