Popularity is something that many are obsessed with since childhood, and it is something that social networks have not stopped promoting in the last decade. For some people, networks like Twitter or Instagram are the perfect opportunity to become the center of attention , have others hear your message or simply a way to feel above the rest. Some achieve their coveted reputation naturally, and others seek shortcuts to achieve it. Thus was born the purchase of followers , a scourge that affects almost all social networks equally.
Why do people buy them?
There are multiple reasons for acquiring fake followers on Twitter. Many years ago, it was done so that a profile on the social network seemed much more important than it really was. Pretending to be a successful “tweeter” could give a user certain advantages over others, such as better relationships with brands , for example. It has also been shown that, despite the fact that the engadgement of a profile plummets from the moment in which fake followers are bought, increasing the number of followers can serve to attract more real followers due to the fact that the well-known “principle of authority”. Or what is the same: “If so many hundreds of thousands of users follow this person, it will be that it is interesting.”
Twitter has tried many times to remove the variable of the number of followers from the equation, but always without success. Today, having a large following on the skybird network is still important . It is essential for those who are forming a new brand, for an influencer who wants to be successful and especially for politicians, who are the users who store the largest number of bots in their portfolio of followers.
And not only that. At first, the fake followers were nothing more than a large number of inactive accounts that served to fatten other accounts. They were easy to spot, as most of them had the famous egg as a profile picture. But today, many fake accounts are managed en masse , responding to comments giving support or even knocking down the opinion of another user. That is why they play such an important role in politics today.
Why do you get fake followers?
However, buying followers is not just a selfish technique. There have also been many cases of companies and organizations that have bought false followers for other users , specifically rivals, in order to accuse them of manipulating their audience.
However, in most cases, you get fake followers because the companies that control these bots need to make the accounts look as natural as possible . They will follow you, randomly “like” some of your tweets, and one day they will unfollow you in a seemingly organic way. They behave like normal users because it is the easiest way to camouflage them on the social network.
What types of fake followers are there?
Empty accounts
Accounts of this type are profiles with no activity . They usually don’t have a profile picture. If they do, we recommend that you right-click and Google the image. With total security, the profile photo will be stolen or will belong to a stock image bank. They usually follow several hundred or thousands of users and usually have no followers . Nor do they usually write any type of tweet, although if they have a history in the timeline, the normal thing is that they are totally incoherent publications, interacting with repeated patterns and without a biography. These types of “users” are generally easy to spot.
These accounts are created in a massive way by companies that sell followers on social networks. Currently these types of accounts are beginning to become obsolete , and are being replaced by bots.
Bots
Bots are one of the challenges that Twitter has failed to solve during Jack Dorsey’s second stage as CEO of the social network. Captcha systems have proven not to be powerful enough to stop the horde of bots that has flooded the social network , especially when elections are approaching in any country.
There are many types of bots, but generally they are very active accounts , with false names and surnames that operate under artificial intelligence . Detecting them today is not particularly difficult, but it is true that each time we can see better elaborated bots and it is more difficult to differentiate them from real users .
The bots usually interact with each other, they mostly use images of humans generated by neural networks or directly use all kinds of photographs screaped from profiles of other social networks to falsify an identity that does not really exist.
Why are you interested in removing them?
Does Pedro Sánchez have too many fake followers? It depends. Donald Trump, had more than 72% of fake followers before being expelled from Twitter.
They damage your credibility
This problem does not affect personal accounts too much, but it does affect projects, companies and organizations. Eliminating your fake followers can be positive for your networks, since they will not be able to accuse you of being fattening your numbers.
Many of your users were once real
This other problem is very common. We all have people that we follow and follow us on Twitter for years. People we even know in person, but whose accounts no longer belong to them , but were stolen and used to send spam . Many may seem inactive, but sometimes, but sooner or later, hackers who have access to these accounts end up using them.
Damage your engadgement
Engadgement has become the center of everything on networks like YouTube, where the number of followers you have doesn’t matter, but rather your ability to connect with your audience and have it interact with your content. Twitter also has its algorithms, and shows us only the tweets that the network considers that we may be interested. Having our profile full of users who will never interact with us can also be detrimental to our profile, since they will never give us a “like”, a “retweet” or comment on us.
Tools to detect fake followers
Here are some of the best tools you can use to analyze how fake your Twitter audience is:
FollowerAudit
FollowerAudit allows you to analyze both your account and that of other competitors . The free plan allows you to analyze up to 5,000 followers, while the basic plan offers many more possibilities, such as comparing audits, analyzing profiles of up to 10,000 followers, following a traceability of the profiles we choose and detecting all kinds of fake or inactive accounts of any profile .
SparkToro
If you are only interested in checking your fake followers (or those of other users), SparkToro is the utility you are looking for. Your “Free” account allows you to analyze up to 10 accounts per day , including ours.
The process is fast, and it will give you a report of the percentage of fake followers that the account you have analyzed has, the number of inactive users for more than 4 months and other data that can be useful to us. Of course, it will tell you the sin, but not the sinner, since it will not show you the list of users in its free version.
Circleboom
With this tool you will be able to both detect inactive Twitter accounts and detect fake followers. In this way, you can easily clean your profile on the social network. It will also show you a list of spammers , users who generate too much noise or even accounts that you follow that publish in other languages and that Twitter tends to hide from you. The service is much more complete and has more tools, but these that we are talking about are within the Twitter Circle section of Circleboom. The price varies depending on the number of tools you need.