In 2018, Twitter, one of the most widely used social media platforms in the world, culled nearly 10% of its user base, which it discovered were fake accounts. 70 million accounts were removed from Twitter over the course of the year .
It would be naive to think this is a problem unique to Twitter. Instagram influencers are notorious for buying followers to falsely inflate their numbers. But not everyone intentionally adds bot accounts to their profiles. Chances are, if you have an Instagram account, you have some followers you don’t even know are bots.
Why are fake followers a problem for your social media accounts?
Fake followers typically don’t comment on your profile, or even like many of your posts. They don’t contribute real discussion to your page or help engage other users on the platform.
If someone visits your profile tips for positioning e-commerce sites and sees that you have 20,000 followers, but you only follow 200 people, and you get about 20 likes on each of your posts, they know something isn’t right in that equation. People get quite critical when others have bought followers to make themselves look good, and that can negatively affect your credibility as a company. There are also some bots that leave spam comments on your posts.
Typically, you can tell if it’s a spam comment or a bot because it has nothing to do with your post’s content, or it’s clearly trying to sell you something. You definitely don’t want bots commenting on your posts with “Hey, buy 30,000 more followers and become an influencer” or “Beautiful baby” on a post that’s supposed to be a philosophical discourse.
How do people end up with fake followers?
It’s actually quite simple. One of two things happens:
Someone sends you a DM with an understanding the fundamental components offer to buy “real” followers for your account that definitely aren’t fake, and you buy them. Or, you specifically seek out a company that goes out of its way to convince you that your followers are different, and you pay them for them.
You have a few bots or fake followers because social media platforms are plagued with them.
How to detect fake followers and accounts
Strange relationship between followers and followed
This is more relevant for belgium business directory judging other profiles you’re viewing, but one of the easiest ways to spot someone with fake followers is by looking at how many people they follow versus how many people follow them. A normal user will probably follow most of the people who follow them. That’s polite, right? But if you’ve gained 10,000 followers overnight, your follower count is going to be much higher than the number of people you follow.
Few posts, but thousands of followers
Another aspect to consider with suspicious profiles is a mismatch between someone’s number of posts and their number of followers. If they have two or three posts but a large number of followers, it’s not a good sign.
Little content
A fake account typically has very little content or surprisingly poor content for their number of followers. If they comment on your posts, they’ll comment on things that clearly don’t fit the post, are grammatically incorrect, or are filled with meaningless emojis. They sometimes post the same one-word comment on thousands of different posts, so if you see a follower posting the same thing on a bunch of your posts, delete them.
Strange profile information
Fake accounts often have very strange things in their profile descriptions. They either make no sense at all or contain little to no information. This, coupled with an account with only three or four posts and thousands of followers, is a red flag. Listen to your instincts; once you start looking for fake accounts, they’ll be easier to spot.
Use a tool to analyze your numbers
There are some services that analyze an account’s follower-to-engagement ratio and give it a score out of 100. Typically, you just need to enter the account name and the number of followers.
What to do now that you know about fake followers?
The good news is that you now know what you’re looking for, and you’ll know not to do business with people trying to sell you likes and engagement on your posts. But that doesn’t help you when you look at other people’s profiles. If you want to pay an athlete or influencer to pitch a product for you, be sure to evaluate their profile before making any final decisions. Look at their previous posts and see what the engagement is like. Are the comments spammy?