How fake Twitter followers can ruin a reputation



Contributing Writer
Photo: Fortunes Told Credit: Michelle Rau


Yesterday I was writing a post and wanted to quote a guy that I knew through Twitter.  I went to his site and saw that in the month or two since I’d visited his page, his Twitter following had grown by a factor of five.  Since I had just found StatusPeople’s Faker tool, I queried his handle and it showed almost precisely what I had observed, 80% spam and inactive accounts (note that StatusPeople say that accuracy of this tool is not as sharp for such large accounts).

Politicians get a pass for fake Twitter followers (and this will soon spill over I’m sure into fake Facebook fans, too).  They’re not touting their expertise in social media, though.  So while it’s a fun diversion from talking about substantive political issues, fake Twitter followers aren’t a reason that people choose to vote for or against a candidate.  Besides, voting is anonymous.

Here’s the problem that I encountered: this guy has some great insights and does a pretty phenomenal job of engaging people on all of his social platforms.  But I can never vouch for anything that he does again.  Even though I admire some of his work, I know that he’s staking his reputation on a lie.

If you’ve read Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Crush It! you’ve read about how he spent all of his free time connecting with people on Twitter to build up a following that stands at 936,000 followers.  Take a look at how StatusPeople’s tool characterizes the make-up of his Twitter account versus Anderson Cooper’s (this may seem random but I promise to connect the dots):

@garyvee snapshot with Twitter faker tool

@garyvee snapshot with Twitter faker tool

@andersoncooper snapshot with Twitter faker tool

@andersoncooper snapshot with Twitter faker tool

The point being that Gary Vaynerchuk developed a Twitter following by working harder than anyone, and has an effective Twitter following comparable to many celebrities (Note that StatusPeople’s tool measures a sample of 500 followers with a preference for newer accounts – specific numbers are not representative of the entire account).  Yet, if Gary took any shortcuts could he write books, give talks, start a media company, and eventually buy the Jets?  Probably not.  And by the way, yesterday Google purchased Wildfire Interactive for $250 million dollars – one of the investors in Wildfire was Gary Vaynerchuk.

Credibility matters.  And while the mechanism and benefit of buying Twitter followers is fairly neutral, the harm to a person’s reputation is irreparable.  Particularly if you’re trying to speak with any authority about social media.  If you want to get scale, you have to hustle like Gary Vaynerchuk.  If you want to take a shortcut, you have to consider that you’re going all in with your reputation and hope you don’t get caught.

***Post-script – I did a better in my last post of pointing out that this is only a sampling of 500 followers with an affinity towards newer followers – the entire methodology is described here:  http://fakers.statuspeople.com/Fakers/FindOutMore/ - so these percentages are only accurate for the sample and aren’t representative of the whole.  Because we don’t know the sampling method you have to assume a large sampling error.  Thanks to commenters for pointing this out!

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

Writer and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.com

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.

Jim Dougherty

@jimdougherty

Writer about social media and tech at Leaders West, I also tweet as @leaderswest.

Infographic: Which sites did Penguin 2.0 impact most? http://t.co/Uzbp9H2FN7 – 1 hour ago

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

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  • http://twitter.com/mickhaensler Higher Ground Media

    I’m building it the Vaynerchuk way. Good post Jim

  • jimdougherty

    Thanks for reading and commenting – now following you on Twitter (since you’re doing it the right way)!

  • http://twitter.com/Antony511 Antony Francis

    Jim, good article I found it thought-provoking and really enjoyed it. I like the concept of http://fakers.statuspeople.com/ but there is a flaw to the concept. As illustrated by a recent attack on our company account. We had an attack of Bot accounts following it, to the tune of 10k, see http://headoflettucemedia.com/2012/06/socialbro-great-spot-trash/ We are not sure the reason for this attack, but we were able to capture all the accounts and send them to Twitter for review (amazingly we only showed as 20% fake when I know it’s almost 50%). I’m not sure that, who’s following you, dictates how good you are at social media, it is more that “interaction” which, Klout, Kred & Peerindex attempt to measure.  

  • http://www.facebook.com/scott.socialmedia.allen Scott Allen

    I hate to see this. You have absolutely no way of knowing how many of those fake followers were as a result of the intentions/actions of the person. If you simply have auto-follow turned on, you’re going to get a very large number of fake/spammy followers. I don’t think that’s sufficient reason to disable that feature.

    And as Antony pointed out below, there are all kinds of reasons someone could end up with a large number of fake followers that’s completely beyond their control.
    I see this as a useful tool for self-evaluation, and, btw, you can use tools like http://TheTwitCleaner.com and http://ManageFlitter.com to clean those up (for free), but I think it’s terribly misguided for someone to use this as a basis for judging someone else’s Twitter account in a meaningful way…probably even worse than taking their Klout score seriously.

  • http://leaderswest.com Jim Dougherty

    Thanks for reading and commenting Antony – hope you’re having a great summer! I wrote another piece on StatusPeople’s tool explaining that it takes a sample of 500 followers with affinity to more recent followers (and failed to make that point in this one), you’re totally right -it’s not assessing everyone and probably is only worthwhile to identify that there are in fact followers who meet a specific spammy criteria. I think the novelty of the Faker tool versus SocialBro is that you can look at other people’s profiles, but your point is correct that the percentages aren’t accurate and there isn’t a ton of specific data you can glean from the tool. Great insight and appreciate you challenging that point – I should have made clear in the piece! Cheers!

  • http://www.facebook.com/scott.socialmedia.allen Scott Allen

    Cases in point…

    @BarackObama:disqus  - 39% Fake, 33% Inactive, 28% Good

    Twitter - 48% Fake, 34% Inactive, 18% Good

    I seriously doubt the Obama campaign invested that much in acquiring fake followers. And if Twitter can’t control it on their own account, how do you (or they) expect anyone else to?

    BTW, it seems that all of the celebrity Twitter users are sitting at about 40% Fake.

  • jimdougherty

    Thanks Scott for reading and commenting.  As I pointed out to Antony, the percentages are inaccurate (it’s a representative of 500) but yes I am saying that Barack Obama probably purchased followers.  What those percentages tell you are that in a sample of 500 accounts, nearly half of them met a criteria used to judge bot followers.  So don’t be deceived to believe that they’re not there, just because the percentages are incorrect.

    That said, Antony’s situation is an outlying one.  There’s not a lot of people getting 10K followers overnight, so while I understand that his situation is valid – the dude that went from 20K to 100K in a few weeks bought his followers and can’t speak with any authority on how to effectively build a following.  

    Here’s the page that describes the methodology behind the faker tool, and I apologize that I wasn’t clear that it’s not a representative sample of an account: http://fakers.statuspeople.com/Fakers/FindOutMore/

    That said, it is a sample.  Cheers!

  • Yvan

    https://www.facebook.com/Thomas.Feichtner.Design

    This product designer has obviously acquired fake fans. If you look at the statistics of his fans they are primarily form Karachi in Pakistan while he is an Austrian Designer. What is really annoying he even photographed himself with a ’100,000 fans’ image to celebrate the 100k milestone. 

    In comparaison, super star product designers have less than 10k fans…

    At least if you acquire fake fans from Pakistan at least keep a low profile and stay humble instead of bragging about it on your page.

    What a shame!!!!

  • http://twitter.com/cammipham CamMi Pham

    Thanks Jim for sharing a great tool :) love it 

  • http://twitter.com/anca1268 Anca Dumitru

    That’s a great post, Jim. Thanks for sharing it. I had a look at my Twitter account using Status People tool without being a celeb with thousands of followers. I’m trying to build my following one step at a time and not inflating it artificially. With all the sampling error that I understand 

  • http://socialmediasun.com/ Adam Justice

    Scott, a big reason that they’re getting fakes is that they’re on a recommended user list when you join Twitter. When people set up fake accounts, they need to follow some people to make them look legit. People who are more famous will likely have a higher degree of followers who are denoted as fake (some accounts people set up that didn’t do anything besides follow people are probably considered fakes too). 

    A for people like us who have no celebrity, we shouldn’t have 40% fakes. If you see someone who does not have a verified account with 40%+ fakes, they’re most likely bought a bunch of followers. 

  • http://sarcasticsam.com Samuel Clemons

    I checked a few of our own both that we have managed from day one, and then others we have taken over.  We are at zero Fake for @ProNetworkBuild with over 120k followers.   We are at about 1 percent fake for @Samuel_Clemons    however, we are at 50 percent fake for @SocialinDC:disqus  which is relatively new, and it could be that the sampling is too small, or is only taking into account the most recent followers. 

    I think there is a flaw in this particular Website.  For instance, many people open accounts, and then never use them.  Twitter forces the end user to follow celebrities upon opening an account. This means that the end user is only doing what Twitter tells them to do.  This is much more prevalent now than even a few years ago.  Twitter is creating this Celebrity Cult worship and the sheep are following along.  

    Logic dictates that if a guy opens an account, follows Gaga, Bruce Springsteen, Barack Obama and Snooky, then bails out on Twitter, his/her account will appear as  “FAKE” which I imagine is a very loose term to denote an egg account, or a barely used account with no specific credible profile.  IT is not fake at all, but a real person, just lame and not very Twedible.  But because they are not good tweeps doesn’t mean they are “Fake”.

    I am not making excuses for Politicians or Celebs.  Trust me on this.  I don’t follow any, they don’t contribute to the conversation, and they are a big waste of time, useless morons all of them as far as I am concerned.  But that doesn’t mean that their accounts are full of “FAKE” followers.  So this site is just a novelty site, and it’s value is negligible at best.
     

  • http://leaderswest.com Jim Dougherty

    Thanks Samuel, my personal Twitter shows a small percentage of fake accounts, too which I certainly haven’t purchased – so the accuracy of the tool isn’t the utility of it so much as is looking at a sample to see if these bot-like accounts exist. I think the person who outed Romney’s fake followers said that the criteria for bot-like behavior is a high number of follows plus 25 or so updates, and I think the criteria for inactive was no updates in the past three months, so one would think that the new Twitter user would be characterized as a bot, though I don’t think the criteria are infallible either. Good insights – thanks for reading and taking the time to comment.

  • http://leaderswest.com Jim Dougherty

    Nice insight Adam, thank you for reading and commenting.

  • sharonhayes

    I agree. Here’s irony on how silly a lot of these tools are: TheTwitCleaner.com has me flagged to unfollow. I’ve communicated with the owner/coder of the site. He said I was flagged because I tweet over the average and am a high volume use.

  • jimdougherty

    Adam, I think this may be the case for spam accounts that are set-up manually  but if you do a quick search on YouTube the high powered Twitter profile generators have the capability to circumvent this step completely and generate hundreds of accounts each day.

  • jimdougherty

    Hi CamMi!  Thanks for reading and commenting!

  • jimdougherty

    Thanks Ancu!  @etelligence:disqus shared an observation about celebrity accounts that may help to understand why some of these accounts show suspect followers.   Bear in mind that the faker tool has its limitations and is probably not representative of the whole.  Except in my case… and yours!  Thank you for reading and commenting!  CHeers!

  • http://twitter.com/Dede_Watson Dede Watson

    Thanks for this tool! I wrote a post recently about Buying Followers. I have personally taken a stand against it by “unfollowing” people that I see are following this unsavory practice.

  • jimdougherty

    Thanks Stephen – you’re correct that because someone fits that criteria it doesn’t guarantee that a profile is fake.  But because there is a common method for people to create these cheap twitter accounts (I wrote a follow up http://leaderswest.com/2012/08/07/how-fake-twitter-follower-bots-work/ ), you can see that looking at these outlying criteria would be helpful to determine the presence of fake accounts.  Because it’s a sample of 500, the percentages likely aren’t accurate, but if a high percentage of those 500 fit those criteria you’ve either bought followers or are attracting bots for some reason.  Appreciate you reading and commenting. 

  • http://twitter.com/FranchiseMall The Franchise Mall

    I thought that getting many followers was a good plan. I slowed down at 6500. I RT the content I think is relevant, humorous, interesting or good reading. I’m doing OK with about 7,000 followers. I will get more, as 10 or so follow me each day and I filter the ones I follow back. No goal to have the most or be the best, although surprisingly I’m the most influential in the We follow group “Franchise”.   Just bein’ me, havin’ fun and learnin’  interesting stuff. Thank you followers. You make my day!

  • http://twitter.com/FranchiseMall The Franchise Mall

    Fake, spam, whatever. My solution is simple. When I find, I keep my thoughts to myself and Ignore. 

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