I follow quite a few internet marketers on twitter, including John Chow (@johnchow).  Recently he posted a tweet about his new service TwitterFollower.com that was basically a list of people who would return a follow if you followed them.  I’ve been interested recently in increasing my follower base in an attempt to try and socialize with more people of similar interests, so I decided to give it a try.

Signing up was a breeze.  Fill out a simple form and submit it.  It requires email verification, so you’ll have to be on the lookout for the verification email before you can access the site.  I use GMail, and I had a little trouble getting the email to come through.  I signed up several times using the same email address and eventually saw one of the verification emails in my ‘all mail’ folder although it never showed in my inbox.

NOTE:  John Chow is an internet marketer, and a good one.  Everything he does is for a reason and to make money.  If you think TwitterFollower.com is an exception to this and just a product of his kind nature, think again.  You’ll notice on the confirmation emails that they are Aweber confirmation emails, which means your email address was just opted in to his mailing list.  How he’ll use this mailing list is of interest, but you never really know.

Once I got my confirmation and logged in, I needed to fill out my twitter information.  After that, I could see the “list” of 18 pages of potential followers (the list is over 23 pages as of this writing).  I spent about an hour following going from page to page following everyone.  Overall, I followed more than 400 people.

After waiting for a few days for the reciprocal follows to take place, I now sit at around 300 follows from that website.  So, about 75% of the people I followed actually returned the follow.

Once I had these numbers, I decided to just randomly follow people to see how the response compared.  After following over 1500 people, I am getting about the same return on follows.

So what does this mean for TwitterFollower.com? Well, it has it’s good points, but it is no better than randomly following people.  Why put your email address on a mailing list if you can just randomly follow people and get the same response?  I will give it this:  I assumed that a high percentage of the people on this “list” would be spammers and marketers that would just bombard me with crap tweets.  However, in actuality I found a much higher percentage of legitimate tweeters following people on “the list” as opposed to randomly following others.  The main drawback is the very limited number of people on the list that you can follow.  That number is growing, but excitement over this site has begun to diminish and growth has slowed so who knows how big it will get.

My conclusion:  TwitterFollower.com is just another resource to find people to follow.  You would be just as good doing a search for your favorite subject and following everyone in the results.  However, the main benefit of the site is the unfollow feature that allows you to easily purge your account of follows that did not return the favor.  I would say that this feature alone is worth putting my “spam-catcher” email address on John Chow’s mailing list.