In the race to achieve maximum visibility and influence a larger audience, businesses may turn to acquire fake followers – which can be detrimental in the long run.  Here are the reasons and techniques to avoid fake followers.

1. Introduction
2. Why are fake social media followers bad for your business?
3. How to Identify Fake Social Media Followers?
4. How can you remove all the fake followers?
5. Conclusion

Introduction

Social media is a great way to connect with people and keep up with the latest trends in your industry. An effective social media marketing strategy will result in healthy consumers, higher traffic, enhanced SEO, increased brand loyalty, and much more.

The number of followers you have on social media is one of the first things people see when they visit your profile. Having a high follower count can indeed help attract potential customers to your page, and improve social branding.

But what happens when you have fake social media followers?

It’s bad news. Buying fake social media followers is not only ineffective, but it’s also incredibly risky.

Did you know that Facebook removed 754 million fake accounts in 2018 to ensure authenticity?

You might think you’re getting a quick fix with fake social media followers, but we’re here to make sure you know the truth: buying followers is never worth it. Fake social media followers are exactly what they sound like—they’re not real people at all, but bots and spammers designed to inflate your follower count and make your social media presence seem more legitimate than it is.

Why are fake social media followers bad for your business?

Several times, fake social media followers are not bought. However, most of the time, accounts may buy extra followers to boost their influence. If you’ve ever wondered why people buy fake followers, it’s because they want to make themselves seem more popular than they are. It is tempting but should be avoided at all costs.

Here are the reasons you should never opt for fake social media followers for social media accounts:

1.    It drives poor engagement.

Engagement is the lifeblood of social media. Without engagement, you’re just another brand posting content no one cares about.

High engagement means your audience is genuinely interacting with your content and the quality of your posts is high. Platforms like Instagram will organically promote your content if it has high engagement. Low engagement implies – either no one’s interacting or they’re not engaging in a way that makes you feel like it’s worth it.

Fake social media followers drive poor engagement and damage your brand’s reputation. Here are some reasons why:

• Fake followers don’t engage with you and your content. They are just there to increase numbers and make you look good on social media platforms like Instagram or Twitter. It does not elevate your social media branding.
• Fake followers have zero loyalty toward your brand or company, and they will disappear once you stop paying them. This can hurt your business because it will take time to recover from the damage done by these followers who suddenly disappear from your account. Moreover, recent algorithms identify a sudden drop or gain in follower count to be suspicious.
• Fake social media followers include bots or scammers who do not care about your business or what you have to say. They do not engage with you because they have no incentive to do so; they just want to make money off of you.

According to Instagram, the most crucial post interactions are comments, likes, re-shares, and views. Your engagement rate is determined by this data in conjunction with your follower numbers. Now, with more followers and fewer likes, comments, and reshares, you actually decrease your engagement. Social media will not promote your content organically.

2.    Social media sites do not prefer fake followers.

Some social media sites may indeed have a way of rooting out fake followers. They do it because it helps them maintain their reputation. If you’re trying to buy followers, you’re going to be caught, and the site will likely ban you from using their services.

In the business of social media, the platforms want people to build their following organically and businesses to pay for advertisements to get more followers.

In 2018, Twitter removed over 10% of its user base after discovering that they were fake accounts. You simply violate the platform’s terms of service by using fake social media followers. For instance, Instagram has clearly stated in its policy  against getting fake Instagram followers.

Do not participate in any “like”, “share”, “comment” or “follower” exchange programs as fake followers can ruin your social media presence.

3.    It reduces your credibility.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—all these social media platforms can be powerful tools for growing your business. However, when you’re trying to build your credibility and make a name for yourself in the world of social media marketing, you need real people to follow you and engage with your content. Fake social media followers don’t count.

If users start to see that you have a lot of fake accounts following you (and especially if those fake accounts are spam bots), they might think that you’re trying to game the system and artificially inflate your numbers. And if they think that, they might not trust what other information they see on your page. In other words – if people think that your account is full of lies and fraudulence, they will not follow your account—including engaging with your content or buying from your business!

If you have 100k followers but only get 15 likes per post, it won’t take people long to infer that your account is spammy and less trustworthy, which makes users less likely to follow you in the future. Modern social media analysis tools rank accounts with credibility scores. Any such unusual calculations can spoil your score.

4.    It disturbs your analytics.

You need to analyze the engagement rates of your social media accounts to prepare social media marketing strategies.

A good engagement rate is between 1% and 5% per post. How will you calculate it? With fake followers on your account, it is difficult to separate true followers and track their activities.

The more fake followers you have, the less likely you will get the actual figures. You will not be able to identify how the actual audience is reacting to your content. Hence, it gets very difficult to define your strengths and weaknesses and create an industry benchmark.

5.    It hurts your marketing campaign.

Your marketing campaigns may be organic or paid. Either way, the way forward is by ensuring that you do not have fake social media followers. Why? Read on to understand.

• Organic Campaigns

You’ve been working hard to establish your social media following, and now you’re ready to start testing out different types of content to see which ones perform best.

But what if your audience is fake? What if the people who are engaging with you aren’t real people at all? And what if the engagement they’re giving you isn’t real either?

Let’s say you have a blog post with 100 comments, but only 25 of those comments were made by real people. That means 75% of your comments are fake. And even if you might be getting a ton of engagement on social media, if it’s not coming from genuine sources, then it doesn’t really matter. These are blockers to your strategy and growth.

The problem with this is that it will skew your marketing tests and results. And since you won’t be able to make informed decisions about future marketing tactics based on past results, you’ll have wasted valuable time building up an audience that doesn’t exist!

• Paid Campaign

When you advertise on Facebook, you invest money to reach your target audience. Facebook and Twitter may collect data from the existing followers of your account.

This goes against you if your current followers are bots or spam accounts.

To create a Facebook advertising campaign, you need to list down the overall profile of your target audience. Of course, you want to ensure the right people see your ads. But, robots or spam users do not really interact with your postings, they will make ads target the wrong audience. They can’t accomplish the purpose of your ad, so promoting to them is pointless.

Your money spent on ads will not let you reach customers.

According to Social Media Examiner, around 91% of marketers use Facebook ads, and 78% are satisfied with their Facebook ads. Thus, fake Facebook followers are clearly a big drawback to your paid social media marketing campaign.

6.    It makes collaboration difficult.

Instagram has released a feature that allows posts in collaboration. Even before that, collaboration with other brands, influencers, etc., was extensively leveraged in social media marketing plans.

17% of companies spend over half of their marketing budget on influencers. Your offer will be denied if you reach out to an influencer or brand with an account with fake followers. While collaborating, the other party also has its reputation to maintain.

Fake followers are no more a secret. Every other social media account will check if you have fake social followers before collaborating. There are many free tools available to easily spot accounts with fake followers.

How to Identify Fake Social Media Followers?

There are many totals available to detect fake Instagram accounts. But you can also do it manually, by tracking the account’s activity. Also, you can check the follower list of an account to see if it is buying fake followers.

Here are a few things you can do to identify fake social media followers:

1. Check out their profile pictures: You can get a good idea of how many of these accounts are real just by looking at their profile pictures. Fake accounts will often have stock images or similar images that look like they’ve been pulled out from Google Images or another photo site. They may also often have the same photos over and over again, which means that they were created using an automated process that does not involve humans (like us!).
2. Look at “how many followers they have” versus “how many people they follow”: If someone has 100k followers but only follows 5 people, there’s a good chance those aren’t real because real people usually follow more than they are followed (unless it’s Katy Perry’s account!!).
3. Posting frequency: If someone has thousands of followers but only posts once every few months, there’s probably something fishy about those followers.
4. An unusually low or high engagement rate: If an account has been gaining a lot of followers but only getting a few likes per post and no comments, it may imply fake social followers.
5. Generic comments and posts: If a person’s account is full of generic comments like “great job!” or “this is awesome”, it might be time to investigate further—they could have bought those comments from a third-party website.
6. Chats: When you send texts to a fake Instagram bot through chat, it replies with similar texts every time and does not have a real conversation at all.
7. Posts: If an account has little to no posts of its own. Well, this one’s pretty self-explanatory!

How can you remove all the fake social media followers?

The most effective technique to remove fake social media followers is to go through your follower list step-by-step. It takes time, but you’ll be certain that your profile has been thoroughly cleaned.

You can follow the steps below:

1. Go through the follower list of your social media account. Note down the suspicious account. You may obviously disregard people you know or with whom you normally interact. But review the profile of anyone you’re unfamiliar with.
2. Run a test, keeping the points mentioned in the previous section on identifying fake followers. If something doesn’t seem right, it probably isn’t. Remember, do not get too caught up in the figures. Create a final list of fake accounts.
3. Remove them from your social media follower section with the ‘remove’ button.

Using tools

There are a lot of tools out there that can help you determine if your brand followers are real and remove the fake ones. Here’s a quick list of some of the most popular ones:

●     TwitterAudit:

This tool allows you to see how many of your followers are real or fake and provide suggestions on how to improve your score.

●     FollowerCheck:

This tool is a bit more straightforward than TwitterAudit; it simply tells you how many fake followers you have and gives no suggestions on how to fix the problem.

●     Social Bouncer:

Social Bouncer is another tool that allows users to check their social media accounts for fake followers. It also provides suggestions on how users can improve their scores by getting more followers or removing them altogether (if desired).

●     Cleaner for IG:

This is an efficient application that helps you unfollow profiles in bulk on Instagram. It lets you block users, by the interaction with posts.

How Can You Keep Fake Social Profiles from accessing your account?

 Here are a few things you can do to keep fake social profiles from accessing your account:

1. Keep an eye on things: You must monitor activities on your social media accounts and find out whether there’s any suspicious activity occurring. Tools like Social Audit can help you detect fake followers on your account by analyzing the number of followers each user has compared with their engagement rate (likes, retweets, etc.).
2. Do not purchase fake followers: It may seem like a good idea at first – having more followers does not mean more people seeing your content and interacting with it – but it’s just going to churn your brand and can jeopardize your entire social media marketing campaign.
3. If you find fake followers, report them! The more reports of fake profiles that get sent in, the more likely Facebook (or Twitter) will take action against them.

Conclusion:

Do not get tempted by the follower count. Fake social media followers are not worth the money. There’s no real advantage in getting a fake social following in the business of social media.

Worse, you may be approached by a well-known business that has not conducted a background check on you. Assume they wanted 50 customers to click through your account to their website through your Twitter or Instagram account. This is readily attainable if you have 30,000 followers. But when half of your followers are false, it makes fulfilling that promise impossible. You may wind up disappointing the brand.

Although followers are the most visible metric of your social media account. But is it the most crucial metric of social media?

The answer is No.

The count of active social media followers is the real metric you should focus on. If you want your business to succeed on social media, then you have to have good content. But what does “good” mean?

It means that your posts are relevant, informative, and engaging. It means that people enjoy reading them and remembering them. Marketing your business on social media has a point when people see your post in their feed or an ad, and want to engage with it and maybe even comment on it or share it! You will automatically get more social media likes and followers with a good content strategy.