Ever since the first social network became main stream some people have been fighting to get the most “friends” or “followers”. While some people are getting massive numbers of followers by simply sending out hundreds or thousands of requests per day, most take the short cut of buying fake followers in bulk. Those selling these type of followers build up their lists by spamming out updates or links to quickly gain tens of thousands of followers.
Dubbed “Social Spam,” this tactic has become increasingly popular and is a multi-million dollar per year business today. Everyone from politicians to celebrities have been known to purchase followers because of the fact that they don’t want to be seen as unpopular. The New York Times recently even called out several celebrities and brands, including Pepsi, Louis Vuitton and rappers 50 Cent and Sean “Diddy” Combs claiming that a large part of their social media consists of fake or bought followers.
A common problem for people new to twitter, for example, is they don’t have followers so they don’t want to promote their twitter account. Without promoting their Twitter account, however, they can’t get followers! That is, unless they purchase them. When these individuals buy several thousands (or even more) followers they instantly gain the credibility they want. They can then start promoting their account to fans and keeps the momentum going.
While this is a quasi-legit reason for buying followers, many others do it to give people the false impression that they are popular or an authority in a specific area. In the world of Internet Marketing, for example, many people will trust the advice of a “guru” with 100,000 Twitter followers. They can then promote their products and get sales based on the belief that they were an authority on the matter which is not necessarily true.
The unfortunate truth about these types of spam accounts is that there is really not much which can be done by Twitter, Facebook or any other major social networks. As quickly as these social networks are banning fake accounts, new ones can be created. Due to the high value many people place on having thousands of friends and followers there will always be a market for these types of accounts.
There are, however, several tools available for people to use which can help identify how many followers of any given individual are real and which ones are fake. SocialBaker’s Fake Followers and StatusPeople are two of the major services which can be used for this, but it is important to recognize that these are not always 100% right. They use a variety of different publically available pieces of information to estimate what percentage of followers are actually Spam.
