Written by Mike Ellsworth   

Yesterday I received more than 50 new followers on Twitter. That’s usually a good thing, but these followers all have similar handles — Trend Target, Trend Wish, Trend Finder, Cloud Trend, Weather Trend, for example — and they have zero Tweets. 

It’s obviously some sort of automated scheme, but I can’t figure out what possible use something like this could be.

Has anybody else seen this type of thing? Any ideas as to what’s up?

Yes, I know the activity is automated, but I just can’t figure out the motive. There are no bios on these accounts, thus no links that someone might hope I would follow. So it all seems pointless.

I mean, it obviously costs nothing to set up an app like TweetSpinner to automatically follow people who mention a keyword. But usually that activity has a purpose: to encourage the followee to then follow you so you can send them a canned message thanking them for the follow and including a link to a blog or site for them to engage in some behavior like buying something.

But these accounts are empty – no tweets, no bio, no nothing. So how does anybody profit from this?