You May Stop Following Me On Twitter Now

I made a BIG mistake this week. No, I didn’t accidentally leave the house without my pants again. It was worse than that – I tried to quickly get more Twitter followers.

In my defense, I am usually the last one on the bandwagon for most things. In fact, the bandwagon usually has four flat tires and is sitting in some ditch on the side of the interstate by the time I’m ready to hop on it. So, when I came across Twiends.com for the first time this week, I naively assumed that I’d get a ton of amazing new followers who would just be hanging on my every tweet and flocking to The Mainland by the dozens.

Well, there’s no question that I got a ton of followers – over 5,000 in fact! And they are kind of amazing – amazingly bizarre! Take a look at these numbers I put together using my advanced college statistics training.

Of my 5,000+ new “friends”:

• 1,000+ don’t speak, write, or understand English, yet have no problem trying to get me to buy something on their eBay store. It’s like shopping on Canal Street in New York right from the comfort of my own living room.
• 900 are apparently the next Eminem – the world just doesn’t know it yet
• 800 can guarantee me THOUSANDS MORE new followers instantly – all I have to do is say the magic word (It’s hippopotamus. Shhhh! Don’t tell.)
• 700 can help me make money online AND increase the size of my manhood AT THE SAME TIME! – Now that’s amazing!
• 600 would have Justin Beiber’s baby if they had the chance
• 500 would like to be Miley Cyrus’ baby if they had the chance
• 400 want their money back – apparently from the same “bi*ch a*s” woman
• 300 want to show me shocking pictures of themselves. (If they have all of their teeth, then yes, I’d be shocked.)
• 200 like butterflies
• 100 claim to be Jesus
• 1 actually clicked on the link to this blog and liked it

Now, if you check out my Twitter profile today, you will not see 5,000 followers. Thankfully, most of them realized that I wasn’t about to go download their latest “str8 up dope” rap song or have any need for male enhancement products. But over 600 have stayed – hoping, just hoping that at some random moment during the day, I might catch their tweet and go “Holy crap, I just gotta click on that!”

So, I decided to sift through the remaining riff-raff and see what these people are all about. Maybe I was wrong about them. Maybe they are fine upstanding citizens who I could really make a connection with. Or, maybe I’m just sniffing glue.

I give you Exhibit A:

So, this guy has over 13,000 followers and likes to “post odd news from around the world”. He also promises “lots of sources and funny stuff!” Being a fellow humorist, I was kind of excited to see all the outrageously funny things this guy was posting. Shall we take a look?

Hmmmm. Maybe I need to get invited to his birthday party in order to get the really good dirt. It shouldn’t be a problem since I’m not a “Missouri person”, right?

Moving right along, we find this guy:

So, I get that this guy makes techno music. (I do too, but that’s another story.) And I understand that he really wants everyone to hear it. My questions are what exactly are the “benefits” of his music, and which species is supposed to receive them? I used to have a pet rabbit. If I only knew about this guy’s music sooner, we might have been able to save him. So sad.

And just some friendly advice from one recording artist to another – if you want the whole world to receive your gift, you probably need to send out more than just 8 tweets.

Here’s another intriguing follower I have in the music business:

Mixtape? When exactly did I go back in time to 1987? I checked out this site, and it seems to me that these “mixtapes” are nothing more than some wannabe gangsta rapper going out of his way to make his iTunes playlist look like a real studio album.

I made an awesome mixtape once too. It debuted at #3 on the school cafeteria charts and featured great songs from Winger, Dokken, Quiet Riot, and Whitesnake. I wonder if I still have it.

And then, there’s this:

Yes, 9,222 people are actually following a flashlight. As far as I can tell, this is the only tool that is currently following me, though “tool” may be a relative term. I have no idea why it finds me interesting enough to stick around, but it better still be there the next time a hurricane rolls through.

So, to the 600+ people (and battery operated equipment) that are still following me on Twitter, feel free to leave at any time. Really. It’s OK. I’m a big boy and my feelings won’t be hurt.

P.S. If you’d like to follow The Mainland on Twitter, check us out at @TheMainlandBlog. I might even let you stay.