Dan Lewis

Faux Realism on Twitter

I use Hootsuite as my desktop (okay, laptop) Twitter client. The third column highlights whenever someone tweets out a link to an issue of Now I Know. A couple of days ago, this happened:

Wow. What happened there?

Look through the accounts and you’ll see that most of them are real estate agents. They’re using a service called New Panda which, according to the linked-to page, features “Auto-Pilot Social Posts”:

“We’ll deliver a carefully planned, written set of content that will automatically post to one or more of your social networks. You decide which post types you like. You can always cancel or reschedule a post in advance. When you don’t have time to actively manage your accounts, we’ll keep you engaged with your audience and generate new comments, leads and referrals. Easy. Brilliant.”

Does it work? I’m skeptical, but here’s the traffic graph for the page these somewhat-automated accounts linked to:

The bounce isn’t huge — only about 50 or 60 more than the average day. Most of them actually come from Facebook:

I assume the 15 “direct” visits are from Twitter. It looks like these half-bot, half-human accounts are delivering some value to their followers. Paint me surprised.