When I’m scrolling through my Twitter homepage, it always makes me really sad when I see people and companies I like touting services that “got them 100s of followers in an hour!”.

Let’s say you run a company’s Twitter account and you’re looking to gain more followers. You sign up for one of these instant follower services because you see someone else on Twitter that’s posted about it. And yes, within an hour, you’ve got tons of new followers and you’re autofollowing them all back. Now, all you have to do is sit back and tweet, confident that your message is reaching the right people.

Only, it’s not. Sure, you may have thousands of followers, but when you rely on a sketchy follower service, you’re not necessarily reaching the people that care about your message. If your followers don’t care about your message, they’re not going to be engaged. Because Twitter is all about conversation, engagement is everything.

Ultimately, there’s no substitute for seeking out likeminded people and replying to them, retweeting them, and following them. It’s going to take a lot longer to get a huge follower number, but if you’re playing well with others, people will notice.

If you use a scammy get-followers-quick scheme, people will notice that, too. If I’m one of those people, chances are, I’m not sticking around.