During my mid-morning article recap, I stumbled upon this: Want 5,000 More Facebook Friends? That’ll Be $654.30. To sum it up, online ad firm uSocial is selling Facebook friends, Twitter followers and more. Basically, you pay them money and they’ll make you APPEAR to be big on the internet.

However, I really have a problem with this whole business plan. As numerous people have said many times before, social media is about QUALITY, not quantity. Sure, I can have 10,000 followers, but if not one of them really cares about me…then what’s the point?

Let’s translate this to business. uSocial says:

The simple fact is, Twitter followers are worth money to you and your business. The more followers you have, the more money you will inevitably make marketing your products and services to them.

I disagree. For instance, if one of my clients has 100 followers, and all 100 were found or return followed because of their interest in the brand or the services it offers, then yes, those 100 followers are worth some amount of money to the company. On the contrary, if my client has 1,000 followers, yet all were randomly purchased through a service like uSocial, what are they really worth?

For one thing, we all know how many bots consume Twitter…so how many of those 1,000 followers uSocial gets you are even REAL people? Of the real people, how many are active users? If not one of your 1,000 followers gets on Twitter more than once a month, what’s the likelyhood of your message reaching them? And even if they ARE active users, do they care about your brand, product or service? Because if they don’t, what’s the point?

Plus, uSocial promises these thousands of followers in a matter of 7 days…truly showing they’re about quantity over quality. I’m sorry, but you can’t find a good follower-base that rapidly.

Finding a fan base takes time, care and knowledge of the brand!

For example, at Pyxl, we help our clients get started on Twitter. But the difference is that we KNOW them, their brands, their products. We live and breathe it everyday and know how  to help our clients use social media in ways that best suite their business and industry. So when we help them create a Twitter account and build their fan base, we take time and care to find people that actually care about them and are (or could be) current or  potential customers of their brands. We don’t find 1,000 followers in 7 days. Instead, we build the following little by little. Like I said: QUALITY, not quantity.

What do you think? Would you use uSocial or a service like it? Why or why not?