When I decided to create a ‘professional’ Twitter (AKA one where I don’t post sarcastic comments to my friend Alisa’s tweets), I didn’t think of the problem I currently have: my follower count. As of Saturday, September 24th, I’ll throw my pride out the window and admit that I had a measly 9 followers. Yup, not even double digits. In my defense, my private just-for-jokes Twitter has 61. So I’m not that unpopular. Lowkey promotion: you should follow me here. Take pity on me.

So what is a girl to do? For preparation for the First Presidential Debate tonight, I figured I’d take a hint from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: fake Twitter followers. Now, as a college student, I don’t exactly have the money to throw away for followers (although $14 for 1,000 followers doesn’t seem like that bad of a deal). Searching around on the internet, I found an app called TwitBoost Pro, where users can buy and spend coins to gain likes, retweets, and followers.

To make your way to Twitter stardom, you have to buy ‘promotions’ with in-app coins. Depending on how many coins you’re willing to drop, you can run promotions getting you anywhere from 4 to 100 followers. Naturally, the more followers you want, the more coins you have to spend. You could spend real money, but since last I checked, I’m still a poor college kid, so I had to choose the app’s alternative route of essentially selling out my account to liking, retweeting, and following accounts that have already paid the coin fee in order to make my own money. In my quest to gain followers, I had to like tweets like this gem:

And this one:

A few awkward likes later, I was able to raise 40 coins in order to purchase ‘4-5’ followers. The app does punish by taking away 8 coins if you if unfollow a user within a week of following them in an effort; it was comforting to know that these hard-earned followers would, at least, stick around for a week. I waited on baited breath for a few hours for my purchase to be completed. When I got a notification that my follower request was fulfilled, I eagerly checked my Twitter account.

Roughly 30 minutes of work got me a net gain of 1 follower. Honestly, I’m shocked I gained a follower at all- I didn’t expect that 1) the app would actually work, and 2) that anyone would want to stick around. Checking out my new high-quality follower, however, I’m not that surprised. Crummy app gets you crummy followers.

I didn’t think of the strategy until I did some snooping into my new best friend: create a burner Twitter account to retweet and follow people for coins, then spend them for followers on your real account. Considering that that strategy just causes all your followers to be burners, I’m not too keen on using TwitBoost Pro again. Eh, who am I kidding. I’ll probably try it a few more times to see if I can get better results. I’m a Millennial after all- I thrive and give myself self worth over my follower count. I  would rather have real people than burners, but sometimes you need a solid fan base in order to convince others to join.

(Hint: that means you with the real-non-egg-profile-picture-Twitter-account should follow me.)