La popularity It is something that many have become obsessed with since they were little, 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, that others listen to your message or simply, a way of feeling above the rest. Some achieve their long-awaited reputation naturally, and others look for shortcuts to achieve it. Thus was born the followers purchase, a scourge that affects almost all social networks equally.
Why do people buy them?
There are numerous reasons to acquire fake followers On twitter. Many years ago, it was done to make a profile on the social network seem much more important than it really was. Pretending to be a successful "tweeter" could grant a user certain and advantages compared to others, as better relationships with brands, For example. It has also been shown that, although the engagement of a profile plummets from the moment fake followers are bought, fattening the followers counter can serve to attract more real followers due to which the well-known «principle of authority» is produced. Or what is the same: "If so many hundreds of thousands of users follow this person, it will be that he is interesting."
Twitter has tried many times to remove the variable of the number of followers from the equation, although always without success. Currently, have many followers in the net of the celestial bird still important. It is basic for those who are forming a new brand, for a an influencer who want to be successful and especially for politicians, who are the users who have the largest number of bots in their portfolio of followers.
And not only that. At first, fake followers were nothing more than a large number of inactive accounts that served to fatten up other accounts. They were easy to spot, as most of them had the famous egg as their 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 are you getting fake followers?
However, buying followers is not just a selfish technique. There have also been many cases of companies and organizations that have bought fake 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 beads look as natural as possible. They will follow you, like some of your tweets randomly, and someday 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
Such accounts are profiles lacking activity. They usually don't have a profile picture. If they do, we recommend that you right click and search for the image in Google. With complete certainty, the photo of the profile will be stolen or will belong to a bank of stock of pictures. They typically follow several hundred or thousands of users and they don't usually have followers. Nor do they usually write any type of tweet, although if they have a history on the timeline, it is normal for them to be totally incoherent posts, interacting with repeated patterns and without a biography. These types of “users” are generally easy to spot.
These accounts are created on a massive scale by companies that are dedicated to selling followers on social networks. At the moment These types of accounts are starting to become obsolete., and are being replaced by bots.
Bots
Bots are one of the challenges that Twitter has not been able 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 what has flooded the social network, especially when elections are approaching in any country.
There are bots of Many types, but generally they are very active accounts, with false names and surnames that operate under a Artificial Intelligence. Detecting them today is not particularly difficult, but it is true that every time we can see better elaborated bots and it is more difficult to differentiate them from real users.
Bots usually interact with each other, mostly use images of humans generated by neural networks or directly use all kinds of photographs scrapped profiles of other social networks to misrepresent an identity that doesn't really exist.
Why do you want to remove them?
Does Pedro Sánchez have too many fake followers? Depends. Donald Trump, had more than 72% of fake followers before being banned from Twitter.
They damage your credibility
This issue doesn't affect personal accounts too much, but it does affect projects, companies, and organizations. Deleting your fake followers can be positive for your networks, since they won't be able to accuse you of fattening your numbers.
Many of your users were once real
This other problem is very common. We all have people we follow and have been following us on Twitter for years. People we even know in person, but whose accounts no longer belong to them, but they were stolen and are used to send spam. Many may seem inactive, but sometimes, sooner or later, hackers who have access to these accounts end up using them.
they damage your engagement
El engagement has become the center of everything on networks like YouTube, where no matter the number of followers that you have, but your ability to connect with your audience and that it interacts with your content. Twitter also has its algorithms, and it only shows us the tweets that the network considers to be of interest to us. Having our profile full of users who will never interact with us as well can be harmful for our profile, since they will never give us a "like", a "retweet" or give us a comment.
Tools to detect fake followers
Next, we will show you some of the best tools that you can use to analyze how fake your Twitter audience is:
FollowerAudit
FollowerAudit allows 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 that we choose and detecting all kinds of fake or inactive accounts of any profile. .
SparkBull
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 daily accounts, including ours.
The process is fast, and it will give you a fake followers percentage report 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 accounts Twitter how to detect fake followers. In this way, you can easily clean up your profile in 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 usually hides from you. The service is much more complete and has more tools, but these are the ones we are talking about are within the Twitter Circle section by Circleboom. The price varies depending on the amount of tools you need.