The open secret is that, if you want a following on the major platforms that use recommendation engines for follow suggestions, you have to pay for your first N thousand so you can trick the recommendation engine into giving you access to everyone else. Everyone and their brother is doing organic content and SEO and all that jazz. You either cheat or don't play.

I accidentally ended up buying followers on Twitter. My wife writes sci-fi novels and I was looking for options to help market the books. At the same time, I was building a software product and trying things out for myself. Amazon had just released their "promotions" platform. One of the things you can do is a sweepstakes give-away. You pick an item on Amazon, set a max number of copies you'll give away, and set proportion of how many people will get the thing if they follow some call to action, and set a length of time. Just wanting to see how it worked, I thought I'd give away some Google Cardboards for people to follow my VR-oriented account on Twitter. I set it to 10 copies for a week, thinking it'd be super low effort and just give me a concept of scale of effort before putting real effort into a "campaign". I think it would have cost me $150 total, if the whole lot had been given away. I expected that maybe I'd get 20 new followers out of it, folks interested in VR since I picked an item I thought would only be desirable if you were interested in VR.

I completely underestimated people's lust for free shit. A week later, 5 had been given away and now I had 3000 throwaway accounts following me on Twitter, where I previously only had about 150 (most of whom were acquaintances). Super low quality, not a single person was there for my content. It was easy to tell; their accounts were full of retweets for other giveaways, they had no other content, and their profiles were empty or talked about being a stay-at-home mom. I was mortified. I thought I was at the door of getting banned.

But something weird happened after. Legit followers started slowly trickling in. Eventually, I had an additional 500 followers, through no new effort on my own. I was still posting the same content, and the promotion was over. Where I couldn't get the needle to move before, suddenly it felt like it was working all on its own.

I eventually got rid of the fake followers. If you block someone on Twitter, it force unfollows your account for them. I then undid the block, just in case there were limits to how many people you could block or if I accidently swept up a friend in my dragnet. It took a solid week of spending an hour a day, force-unfollowing people.

I have a job that I love now (working in VR, I'm the head of the department), so I'm not trying to side-hustle anymore. And life is much better now. I still get a few legit followers every month, but I'm not putting any effort in other than posting what I want to talk about. The clear pay-to-win aspect of Twitter is not something that interests me. I never wanted to buy followers. I thought I was being smart about just getting my name in front of interested people and then they'd decide if they wanted to follow me or not. But that's not how it works. You're getting the randomized masses, and they are clicking through promos too fast to consider even the item that is being given away. But that is apparently necessary, if you're not already some kind of celebrity.