London’s claim to be the Twitter capital of the world is meaningless when as many as 30 per cent of Twitter accounts are bots and users are obsessed with follower numbers as a measure of authority.

So-called mechanical networking has become a popular means of building a large network quickly. Business Development advisor Ian Brodie (@ianbrodie, 46,284 followers)  has built a large twitter following as an experiment to investigate its impacts. He used a variety of tools to do so.

How to auto-network
Brodie says that such strategies all come down to following lots of people so that they follow you back. He claims that if you have an interesting profile and are suitably interesting then 40 to 50 per cent of people will follow you back.

“If you’re going to target people to follow, then the only way to do this in the volumes necessary to gain lots of followers, is to automate,” said Brodie.

“There are a variety of software tools available like Tweetadder and Hummingbird which will allow you to automatically follow Twitter users based on criteria like what they’ve tweeted or who they already follow,” he added.

But surely there are downsides to mechanical networking? We Are Social’s Simon Collister (@simoncollister, 2,409 followers) is quick to spotlight social issues.

“Socially you don’t necessarily get to interact with all the [people] in your network and thus might risk not developing a strong peer-to-peer relationship,” he said.

Despite having built a large following himself, Brodie strongly recommends that for most people, by far the most effective strategy is to use twitter to build deeper relationships with a much smaller set or contacts.

“The reality is that people with many thousands of followers struggle to interact properly with those followers. They simply have too many to be able to form real relationships with them. Some people, such as internet marketers, have used large followings to successfully drive traffic to their websites and mailing lists where they try to sell them products. But for the rest of us it’s much better used as one of many communication methods we have to build real relationships with people,” he said.

Anti-social approach
Social network purists reject mechanical techniques as a means of building a social network. David Cushman (@davidcushman, 3,156 followers) managing director, 90:10, labels it antisocial.

“It’s like someone who arrives at a university’s Freshers’ Week and goes about indiscriminately joining every club and then refuse to come to any of the meetings unless they first get appointed to the organising committee. By people they don’t yet know and who don’t yet know them,” said Cushman.

Cushman says that mechanical networking is also likely to put you in breach of many networks’ terms and conditions.

“But more critically you will mark yourself out as using social networks in a broadcast, one-to-many way. No one wants to talk to someone who doesn’t listen,” he said.

Technology writer Milo Yiannopoulos (@nero, 3,397 followers) and Telegraph.co.uk’s Will Heaven (@willheaven, 878 followers) are both critical of mechanical networking techniques.

Network experiment
We Are Social’s Twitter feed (@wearesocial, 30,654 followers) has come under fire from Yiannopoulos. But managing director Robin Grant (@robingrant, 3,543 followers) is candid about its approach.

“We did experiment at different times last year with different techniques to grow an engaged follower base for a Twitter account with minimum effort using the @wearesocial account as a test bed,” said Grant.

“We had some success with this, but ultimately our position remains as follows – the key to success is the simple technique of growing an account organically by being interesting to your target audience and engaging in conversation with them,” he added.

Grant says that 66 per cent of its followers are engaged users. According to analytics the balance (34 per cent) are either bots, have abandoned Twitter or been suspended.

Bot-network
Mat Morrison (@mediaczar, 2,483 followers) founder of the Magic Bean Laboratory suggests that Twitter accounts that use mechanical rather than organic techniques may simply be building their own bot-community off the side of the main trunk of Twitter.

“There’s anecdotal evidence and logic to suggest that bots auto-follow, and that the main group of twitter accounts that follow bots are those who auto-follow. It looks horribly like a feedback loop to me,” he said.

Follower numbers as a metric are flawed at best. But then what are valid metrics in a Twitter network?

“Engagement […] is as important as volume. It is affected by volume and represents the human aspect to using technology to socialise. We always try and break our initiatives into hard and soft metrics,” said Paul Fabretti (@paulfabretti, 2,091 followers), director, Gabba.

90:10’s Cushman simplifies measurement to a single word – outcomes.

Stephen Waddington (@wadds, 2,034 followers) is the managing director of multi-sector PR agency Speed.