This is probably the first question you are asking yourself if you are beginning to read this post. Well, buying followers on twitter or ‘likes’ on Facebook for that matter is a HUGE business. All you have to do is type it in to google and you will see hundreds of companies willing to offer you anything from one to ten thousand followers overnight. But why would you do this?? If you have 90% fake followers, then how can you expect to build an online reputation or connect with any of your followers. Many of the companies that offer the services of likes or followers would have you believe that you are getting real people but this is rarely the case.
You’re only fooling yourself
If my teachers had said that to us once in school regarding cheating, they told us a thousand times. It applies just as much to a company or a person on twitter. I guess my teacher was right and eventually you do get caught out and it can really reflect badly on how people think of you.
Twitter accounts that have a huge following will naturally arouse some kind of curiosity with people unless you have had access to some huge media channels or are a celebrity. This is especially so if the accounts have very few tweets and thousands of followers ( this is a key tell tale sign).
How can I be sure ??
Everybody picks up a few bogus followers without buying them, it may be someone who had tried twitter and followed you and then stopped using twitter altogether. There are some great applications like ManageFlitter and CrowdFire App where you can use these to manage who you are following and your followers.
A good way to check if your account has fake followers is to carry out a Fake Follower Check. You can also carry out a Twitter Audit. The twitter audit will take a random sample of 5000 of your twitter followers and calculates a score for each follower. The score is based on a number of tweets, date of the last tweet and the ratio of followers to friends. Of course, it is not perfect but it can give you a very good indication of what accounts have actual followers and what ones have not.
SO, How do I fair out ???
Recently I had someone ask me if TweetingGoddess the founder of IrishBizParty had bought followers as she has close to 23k followers. I guess that for a newbie to twitter it is a fair question but for someone who is used to using it can see that this is an example of an account that is organically grown through a huge commitment to connecting with people via twitter. If you look at the fact that there is 174k tweets, it is not hard to understand that it is the content that is attracting new followers.
After getting the question it made me want to check my own following of The Brand Geeks and also some other accounts just to show that there are some accounts that you would not expect to have a fake following according to the two sites mentioned above.
So there you have it for fake followers, it’s not a good idea and it will only give your business a bad reputation if found out.
What do I do with my fake followers??
The site that I previously mentioned Manage Flitter have conveniently written a blog on how to identify and remove fake followers in 3 steps and the link is here.
In the meantime, if you do want to have loads of followers who get what you do and like to read your tweets, put some time into great content because that is what everybody loves.
If you liked this post, please tell me on twitter www.twitter.com/thebrandgeeks
