Fake Social Media Followers and Accounts - How to Spot Them

 Fake social media followers are really common these days,

For some reason, there seems to be a trend where numbers matter more to businesses than actual sales. When you're looking at it like that, it doesn't make sense does it?

That is the problem that I'm facing as a social media manager for businesses. This especially applies in the music industry where I tend to interact with artists, bands and record labels that have huge numbers of twitter followers - sometimes over 500,000 where 80-90% are fake.

Having fake social media followers doesn't make sense from a business perspective, because you look at higher numbers of people that don't tiktok followers kaufen actually go on the social network at all. So it's just an e-mail address that no-one uses that is registered to an account that no-one uses that is following your account.

I personally believe that an actual social network of 100,000 is worth a lot of money, as it can be used to promote and grow revenue to make up 70-80% of business income.

You can have a look at my twitter profile to understand what I mean, this has 110,000+ followers when this article was written.

This is a network I built over the last year and something, from scratch using some proper social media management techniques that I base most of my work on.

If you have a look at the account you will say - this is probably fake - but there is a really simple way to check this particular account that does not involve anything extra.

Unless there is a known brand or personality or it's an account publicised on a massive-traffic website, they will not have a large number of followers and not be following a lot of people.

For example, my account has 110,000 followers but I'm following 90,000+ people back. This is because I follow back people that follow me, thus increasing the bond and relationship between us as people, and encourage them to promote my account, even sometimes using the #followback hashtag.

If you are following people back - Twitter's limitations do not allow you to follow more than 1000 people per day - so this means that during the lifetime of the account I had to have 1000 real people follow me and follow them back on a daily basis for at least 90 days. Because you never get 1000 per day unless heavy advertising is involved - most likely this number is around 200 per day - so it took around 450 days for me to grow to this number - this is actually a bit less than my account age - this is displayed on my Twitter main page, that I joined in July 2010. This proves that I cannot have fake followers as twitter would disable my account if I was following 90,000 accounts that are inactive - therefore fake.

What about the other 20,000 going to 110,000?

If you calculate - number of people that are actually interacting with you from 90,000 follow-backs you will get at least 50% of people advertising you or mentioning you to say thanks and 20% of their network people following you from that - hence the 20,000 extra followers I have on top of my 90,000.