Being fake is not new.
Years ago we had fake web sites (Phishing) and spam email etc..
Now Social media is the target of the fakers, that’s life I guess.
After spending some time venturing into social media, you will no doubt come face to face with fake accounts. Then you might get accustomed to the give away signs of a fake follower. They are become ever more sophisticated. Years ago, it was very easy to spot them. I could see new accounts created after 10 days or so having 1000’s of followers when they only tweeted 5 or so times. How can that be? It just did not add up.
X (Twitter) is not the only target of the fake accounts. There are people selling fake Pinterest, Facebook and YouTube followers or subscribers.
Years ago I spent some time looking at fake Facebook accounts. I recall seeing 100s with smiling profile pictures, but they had not posts on their wall. They all had the same personal data, like religion, political affiliation, and favourite topics like food, films, travel.
Selling fake is now big business for some people.
Earning a living being fake? Some people seem to choose this as a career. The New York Times highlighted this recently with their post “Fake Twitter Followers Become Multimillion-Dollar Business”.
This is obviously not exclusive to the online domain, and this story gives a new meaning to “BIG business” – A conman made £50million by selling fake bomb detectors based on £13 novelty golf ball finders.
Do we all have fake followers?
Almost all Twitter accounts have at least some fake followers of one type or another. Here are 11 ways to spot a fake Twitter account
Buying fake followers for company accounts is just not clever at all. It was not easy to work out the fake % of twitter accounts years ago, but today there are many free services available. A quick win to buy fake accounts years ago to boost your account standing is a brand reputation killer now that we can all work out your fake follower %. This might of been seen as a way to avoid a new Twitter account looking “new”. It reminds me of the advice I read when I first made web sites in the early 1990s, which was to inflate the web site visits /visitor counter at the launch of a new website. The counters were very commonplace on web sites at that time.
What is the benefit anyway? Posting to fake followers is a waste of time and fake followers make engagement, social status and influence statistics extremely poor.
So how many fake followers do you have?
For X (Twitter) it is possible for you to clean up the people who you are following, and there are many tools for that. However, you have only a few options (see below) over who chooses to follow you… unless you plunge into the murky waters and buy fakes! Be careful of your company colleagues (or your agencies) looking at this quick win. It is a false win in so many ways!
Here are some example results:
To be balanced, what about my own account?
Celebrity and well known business accounts do attract higher fake followers of one type or another.
Inactive accounts and not reachable are counted here. So older accounts might get higher % results.
I also analysed X (Twitter) accounts of people who sell fake Twitter accounts. In my research I found that they fell into 2 categories:
– They did not bother to have hardly any followers at all.. or
– They loaded up with as many fakes as they could use!
You can work out your own using this tool for Instagram and this one for X
Are fake accounts harmful?
Some fake accounts are just a harmless fake name, maybe no bio and no profile picture, but some are more dangerous. Some might be hackers and internet criminals that may send out malicious Twitter bots to follow you. There are some options available, like protecting tweets, reporting accounts and blocking accounts. Here is a post listing the options available to you for X.
How do you feel about fake followers?
If you know me, you will know that this topic is one that really gets me going! Red hot! The sellers of fakes often turn up on accounts without an invite. On my Facebook fan page I sometimes get a message like “I added 2 followers to your page so if you want more just go to…” and how often do you find comments on your Instagram posts from sellers promoting fake likes. Grrrrr! So what you you think about fakes?
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