As a social media expert who manages a number of client’s social media pages, fake accounts are the bane of my life. It can be really tempting in a world where people are obsessed with numbers and popularity to buy fake accounts and bulk up your numbers, but trust me, it’s extremely damaging to your brand, especially if you’re an influencer!
Below is my guide to fake followers, why they exist, why they cause problems and how to detect and banish them from your accounts!
Why do fake profiles exist?
Before we delve into why they exist, first you need to understand how social media algorithms work, and what even is an algorithm…
A social media algorithm is a set of rules that rank content across their platforms, it decides what content a user is shown when they access the platform and in what order that content shows up.
With the increase of AI capabilities, many of the platforms you use are relying on AI more than ever to manage their algorithms which is making content more personal to what a user likes (or what the algorithm thinks you like).
Each platform has a slightly different algorithm:
- Meta (Instagram and Facebook)- For 2024, Facebook has updated its algorithm to focus on meaningful interactions (posts that’s spark engagement and conversation), relevance, predicted time spent on a post (AI driven) and a balanced mix of formats/content
- Tik Tok- Whilst somewhat similar to Facebook, there’s a bigger opportunity for reach across TikTok because of the way it is set up- Based on content that the user has engaged with, the algorithm is able to share endless amounts of video content to meet the users on the For You Page. So if you keep telling TikTok you really like watching video content with cars, you’re more likely to keep seeing that content on your personalised For You page.
- Twitter- The algorithm ranks content based on several factors, including personal interest, location, recency, and virality. However, Twitter allows its users to decide between the algorithmically driven default timeline (Top Tweets) or viewing Tweets in reverse chronological order (Latest Tweets)
- Threads- Meta have only recently shed a bit of light on how their Threads algorithm is built, and to no surprise, its ranked by AI. And this is only used for the ‘For You’ feed. It works in 3 steps, gather a selection of content you follow, analyses your engagement of that content, ranks content delivered to you based on that analysis.
There is of course many other platforms (such as LinkedIn) that I could delve into, but for the sake of this article, we’ll just use those as examples.
So, ideally, you want your content to be seen by real people with real engagements in order for more real people to see your content…
So why do fake followers even exist?
Well, Neil Patel covers this in one of is articles about deleting fake followers which I’ve used for some of my insight below, but there are a few reasons they exist:
- Main reason, to make money from people, either by promising users they can get them a bunch of new followers or by scamming them pretending to be someone else.
- To spread fake news and misinformation
- Trolling/ Satirical reasons
Should I remove fake followers?
Ok, so you’re an influencer or someone unfortunately very insecure and wants to appear more popular than what you are. So, you decide to buy a bunch of fake followers…
Or maybe you didn’t buy those fake followers and unfortunately, you’ve discovered that a number of your followers are indeed fake (we’ll come onto detection later down the page).
What’s the harm of having fake followers?
- Monetary loss- The fact you’ve spent that money in the first place is a loss enough, but if you are an influencer and looking to make money from collaborations or content creation, you’re going to come unstuck. Any decent agency or business will look into the quality score of your account and they’ll see that the followers you have and the ‘engagements’ they are driving are fake. No one in their right mind will want to pay for fake followers to view their sponsored content. So you’ll become seen as untrustworthy and avoided.
- Marketing- a good measure of social media performance is engagement. The more fake followers you have, the lower the engagement rate will be. However, some fake accounts can now be programmed to like and comment on your content, so you won’t be able to tell what engagements are real or fake, again, massively impacting your performance insight. (If you need help with your digital marketing performance and analytics, you can find my digital marketing and social media services here).
- Security- Buying followers could actually lead to security breaches and potential hacks of your account, this has been seen numerous times and once your account has been hacked, its very difficult to get it back!
- Mental health- If you have got to a point where you have spent money on buying followers in order to appear more popular, it might be time to take a break from social media. When used in the right ways, social media is a great tool, but sadly, it’s far too often used negatively and can lead to depression and anxiety. Step away from the platforms and take some time for yourself!
So how do you know if someone is using a fake profile?
There are some obvious telltale signs of a fake account no matter what platform you are using:
- Their username will appear generic or impersonal (contain a string of numbers for instance)
- Their content will either be repetitive or none existent. A page that has 6 pictures that look nearly identical is likely to be suspicious.
- They may be following a large amount of people but barely any followers themselves
- Or they might have a large number of followers but their content is seeing little or no engagement (meaning those followers are probably also fake accounts).
There are also tools you can use to see how many fake accounts are following you or another account. One of which is inbeat (and what I used to gather the below example)!
An example of an influencer on Instagram with a bad quality score
So, without naming or shaming, I took an account that I found that has over 100,000 followers. The influencer is super active and appears to get a massive amount of engagement so on the surface, it’s looking positive! However, I did a check manual check and spotted immediately a number of clearly fake users following the account. So I put their username through the checker and the stats were pretty shocking!
63% of their followers were fake! So even though their engagement rate was pretty good at 2.9%, these are likely fake account engagements and therefore lack quality.
This means, any organisation that pays to have that influencer run a sponsored ad or collaboration post will be paying for 63% of their audience who don’t exist!
Other tools include https://igauditor.com/ and https://www.twitteraudit.com/ to help you quickly determine how bad the issue is (and for you marketers out there, you can use these tools to sense check whether it’s worth working with an influencer or not). There are more expensive tools such as Brand Watch but those really are only for big agency types as the price tag is crazy!
How do you deal with fake followers?
Unfortunately, automated platforms for removing fake accounts from your profile are few and far between.
Ideally, you should be conducting health checks on your account on a weekly basis. If you didn’t pay for your followers and you’ve unfortunately found yourself with a host of spammers clogging up your audience stats, it’s likely that a few fake accounts followed you and because nothing was done about it, more and more started to attach themselves.
Manually staying on top of it by going onto their profiles and blocking their interaction with you should keep further bots at bay. But if you’re anything like the account above, that’s going to take you a hell of a long time manually removing 60k+ fake accounts!
There is some good news for some of our most beloved platforms:
- Twitter- twitter audit is a really good tool that I have used for a number of my clients. It’ll give you a free health check and let’s you know how bad the problem is. You can then pay for the audit and block package to remove a number of those accounts on a daily basis. So it might still take a while to rid them completely but it will be much quicker than doing it yourself! And the price isn’t extortionate either!
- Instagram and TikTok- I haven’t used this tool but the reviews it has got (not a massive amount) seem to be fairly positive- https://www.spikerz.com/
Ultimately, my recommendation would be to hire a professional, who already has access to these tools and will be able to give your accounts a full audit as well as arrange working with a quality backed influencer and negotiate those relationships for you! If you need social media support, check out my social media services available to businesses and get in touch.
