Tomorrow at Social Media Club South Florida, we are getting together for our celebratory five year anniversary. The title of the panel is going to be : Stop Faking It.
(Image courtesy of Mich Elle for SMCSF )
I’ve been wanting to do a post on fake followers on Twitter for a while about what a former politician was doing last year. Since I am not sure if he is aware of it, I am not going to mention his name. Last year, when he had a million followers, I used a free tool to check this users account and it showed a whopping 99% fake followers. Today he has over 372,000 followers.
Now his fake followers is at about 80%. It seems that they used a tool to purge the fake ones. After doing a Google search on Fake Followers for this blog post, I found a website that has a tool to remove your fake Twitter followers. But after reading the comments it doesn’t seem to work very well. Some people complained of losing some of their real followers instead. Oh well, the price you pay for doing it the wrong way to begin with.
Using the first tool mentioned, on my @miamishines account, it shows I have 2% fake followers. One of the accounts was one I opened last week when I was doing a demo at a Social Media class to a group of newbies at an AARP event showing them how to open a Twitter account. So that one doesn’t count. The tool separates inactive users with good ones, so out of my 2600 followers, almost all are real. Now that I see that my demo account is listed as fake, I should delete it. It only has one tweet.
A couple of months after seeing the account with the fake followers, I happened to be browsing on my Iphone for the tweets during the Hispanicize Conference using the hashtag #hispz13 . Lo and behold, the top Twitter person was the same account. It had 1,399 retweets using the #hispz13 hashtag and probably more by the time the event finished! When you follow a hashtag, Twitter will show you the top users by default. By clicking “All”, you can see everyone that is Tweeting on that hashtag.
Please note that my good friends and married couple, Teresita Chavez @cubanlawyer and Larry Pedrosa @miamilawrence are legit . They just appeared on the feed when I took the screenshot. 🙂
Anyway, what really irked me is that his Twitter account showed up as the top Twitterer and his account showed up every time I checked that hashtag. I was mega annoyed. After looking up who was retweeting his tweets, it looked like they were all bot accounts. It is obvious he hired some person that promised him a boatload of followers and retweeets quickly for a pretty penny. And to boot, he has one of those little blue checkmarks that says it is a verified Twitter account and a Klout score of 82.
It seems that he is still has someone getting spam retweets on bot accounts. Check out these screenshots on November 9th alone:
But on November 9th, he didn’t seem to use the bots. He got 7 Retweets and 3 favorites compared to over 2000 retweets with only 1 favorite:
By clicking one one of the bot accounts that Retweets, there are over 700 Tweets only retweeting this account. Yep, every single one of those 700 Tweets are simple Retweets from the same account. It is the same with many others. An account with 300,000 followers cannot possibly get over 2000 Retweets several times in one day. Seriously, all he is sharing is regular articles. Nothing of the likes of Lady Gaga with over 40 million followers and her outrageous antics. On this Tweet she got almost 3,000 Retweets and 2,468 favorites.
This New York Times article states that prices range from $9 a month for 5 retweets to hundreds of retweets a day for over $100 just on one account. Tools like Fiverr, SEO Clerk, Fan Me Now and others are listed as services for this multimillion dollar industry.
Here is another example of getting fake likes on Facebook. Check out this video where an reporter from The Guardian recorded undercover how a company in Bangledash “liked” a page with thousands of Facebook accounts. These people have 15,000 Facebook accounts. Holy moly! It was a page of an online casino sub licensed by Hasbro. Hasbro had no idea and soon after, that page was shut down.
Around the time that I saw this video, I had noticed a friend’s relatively new Facebook business page likes had gone up from about 200 likes to about 1800 likes. I asked her about her big jump in likes and she said she hired someone on Fiverr to boost it up. She did that because the business next door gave her that tip. Now they have about 1600 fake likes. I guess it looks better than 200. But really, what is the point? The engagement ratio will be null. It would have been much better if she did a targeted Facebook media ad buy. Needless to say, I emailed her the video and told her to stop doing that.
You can even get fake followers on Instagram. Check out this Mashable article. 1000 fake likes sold on hacker forums will cost you $30 and 1000 fake followers will cost you $15.
So moral of the story is: Be Real…or you soon will end up on the Fakers Wall!
If you got to the end of this article, I will shamelessly plug my Facebook page for Vizred and Mi Caminar (for doses of inspiration) so you can give me some organic likes. 😉
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