Twitter is awash with gullible people who buy into these schemes. I suspect a large number of them have bought these software packages that promise to build them a twitter following while they sleep and pay them royalties if any of those followers are equally gullible and buy the package. We used to have a name for this kind of operation: Pyramid.

The blatant ones are just full of links to their product, the subtle ones (I suspect, the ones on the software) are mostly contextless quotes from “worthy” figures with only occasional links, to make it harder for Twitter to spot they are abusing the rules.

I fund Twitter at its best when you can have a friendly chat with a few people while taking a break. The real benefit is of starting conversations with the people they talk to, and building your network that way.