Do you know the difference between real and fake followers on social media? Do you know how harmful fake followers can be for your platform? How can you keep fake followers from hurting your stats on social media sites? We are going to tell you all about them and how you can keep the repercussions of fake followers at bay.
A fake follower is a social media account that won’t interact with the social posts and therefore lowers follower engagement numbers. For platforms like Instagram, you can buy fake followers in droves, but having a high number of followers will not help you in the end if they are not all engaging ones.
We’ll bet you didn’t know that as of April 2019, social media accounts like Facebook had deleted a whopping 2.2 billion accounts that were deemed fake. Twitter was deleting 7.5 million fake accounts weekly.
Fake accounts pose a security threat to social media accounts and statistics for company pages that rely on their platforms to promote their business. Having fake followers, willing or otherwise, could mean higher operational costs for your company and lower growth levels for your social pages.
Purchasing or attracting fake followers to your account can make your business appear unreputable, and it could seriously damage your brand with trustworthy and loyal followers.
Here are some ways to know which followers are fake, especially if you already have a high volume of them and don’t realize it.
- See if all your followers belong to your target group. If not, they won’t respond to your content as often, if at all.
- See what the overall engagement on your social media account is. If the numbers don’t match up, then you probably have a significant number of fake followers.
- Report them when you find them! Let the site administrators look into it and help others out by drawing attention to a suspicious account.
- Do a double-check on new followers by tracking their response to giveaways and advertisements for your company.
Hypothetical equation for fake followers: a new follower goes to your Instagram page and sees that you have 10,000 followers, you follow around 150 people, and each of your posts gets maybe 12 likes. They’re going to look at those numbers and think something isn’t right about your page, and they won’t follow you even though they are the kind of follower you want!
If the number of followers you have on a social media platform is not reflected by the number of accounts you follow in turn or have responding to your content, then high numbers won’t help you. They will hurt you. Badly. Keep that in mind when you try to go for quantity over quality of followers for your company social pages.
