Why do people pay for friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter?

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Why on earth do some people buy friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter? I say friends, but of course I don’t really mean friends at all when money has changed hands to acquire them, I mean online identities attached to your own as friends or followers, according to the parlance of the two social networking sites.

On Twitter, followers can be bought in blocks starting at £53 for 1,000. They’re not cheap. The biggest block marketing firm USocial is selling is 100,000 people. Nobody has 100,000 friends. I don’t know anyone with 1,000 friends. Not real ones at any rate. A few hundred, sure, but how many of those are friends and how many are mere acquaintances, passing ships in the night?

Most of us can understand the human drives involved in paying for company, paying for sex, whether we object to such transactions on moral and religious grounds or not. Loneliness and lust are the most obvious factors involved in reaching for your wallet in order to get the chance to touch and caress someone else’s body. But forking up serious money just to stack up the number count on a column on a website?

Real friends are there for you at times of joy or crisis, they sit down with you and gossip over coffee, they go out with you to bars and clubs and events. You don’t pay them or a third-party. Of course many of our friends on these sites are online only, but the communications—the chats and the helpful advice, the consoling words in times of grief, the congratulations on getting a new job, the debates on issues of the day, the occasional no-word, thumbs-up, mouse-click response to something you’ve posted—are nevertheless very genuine and real, essentially human and worthwhile.

Where is the profit in the so-called ‘enhanced’ profile? Would you feel more inclined to heed the instant message of someone wanting to sell you something online if they had thousands of attached followers or friends? My reaction would be to run in the opposite direction. I am innately suspicious of Twitter and Facebook accounts with huge numbers of attached identities unless it’s understandable because they’re high-profile celebrities like Stephen Fry.

We can argue the point, but supposedly Ordinary Joe must be suspect if he has 22,456 people supposedly enthralled by his daily tweets or Facebook updates about his goldfish and obsession with hummus. If his real aim is to sell erectile dysfunction pills, one wonders how much value for money he’s getting from buying those followers, how many of them convert to sales?

Of course we do come across people online who seek to collect friends and followers like stamps or badges, on a more modest scale than that offered by USocial, without money being involved. My reaction to them is one of puzzlement, and I wonder what drives them to do what they do.

If you want to follow @spicycauldron on Twitter, go right ahead. I’d welcome you doing so. But I don’t crave followers, and even if I was a millionaire I wouldn’t buy them.