An Experiment in Social Media Marketing: Buying Twitter FollowersAn Entrepreneur contributor gets his social media followers the old-fashioned way: He buys them.

Despite making my living selling stuff people hopefully want to read or talk about, my business is just like yours. Though my digital content company has a good number of followers and friends, I struggle to turn Twitter, Facebook and the rest of thesocial mediamafia into real money.

So about a month ago I started an experiment: I treated Twitter just like any other direct marketing medium. I began to study the dozens of online social marketing companies that promised tosellme Twitter followers, Facebook likes and YouTube views.