Having conducted quite the experiment in recent weeks I have some worrying findings, at least for those who work for Twitter, and that is that MLM or Multi-Level Marketers are going to be able to absolutely crush on it the social media platform. This of course is still social media network which is in its growth stage, people like Britney and Shaq only have 10,000 and 18,000 respectively, big numbers win terms of the number of users on Twitter but a tiny percentage of their worldwide fans, just imagine when Twitter blows up!

My experiment was to use some promotional marketing in order to drive followers to my page, and given the results, Twitter should be very worried. I am just a small example of what the likes of MLM legends like Gary Veynerchuk and Kevin Rose may do once they start doubling down, and here is why. 

Quick Promo

I tweeted out to my 1,800 followers that I would offer them a $25 gift voucher to be used at an online store and there were 10 to give away. All the follower had to do in order to be in with a chance to win was drop a retweet to all of their followers, simple enough. I watched with amazement as the post was retweeted over 700 times, and all told by the end I had gained an extra 300 followers. Now of course some of those may not like what I have to say and therefore for the ease of the example we’ll smooth that down to a round 250 followers, at the cost of a dollar each. 

Dangers 

The reason why this approach may end up killing Twitter is that we may very well see an age, at least for a short time, whereby the social media website’s newsfeeds are literally full of this, a marketing frenzy, with more people focused on getting followers rather than gaining valuable and high quality followers. We can also see the risk which this may pose to high quality content which can easily become lost in the mire as people are just relentlessly retweeting offers, turning a high quality social media site into a world of spam. My investment was $250, imagine if a larger company looked at dropping $25,000 and still offered a small number of prizes such as 25, all looking at earning $1,000 each. Given that a RT is worth less than a second of someone’s time, just imagine how far and wide that could travel. Once businesses or MLMs start taking it a step further by posting images of products or books, Twitter will become a feeding frenzy which lacks any content. 

This is a platform which relies on real time updates, news from around the world, opinions, shares and community spirt, all of that could be easily eroded if the site continues to make it so easy for MLMs to gain an advantage.