How do you measure your street cred? In the social media world followers equal street cred. But what if your street cred didnââ¬â¢t have any, well, cred?
What if a large percentage of your followers werenââ¬â¢t real? What if they were just computer generated followers using bots, spiders, crawlers, scrapers, sniffers ââ¬Â¦ Pretty unsavoury that. Fake accounts run by computers.
Earlier this year Baracuda Labs published a study called The Twitter Underground Economy: A Blooming Business ââ¬â A study on Dealers, Abusers and fake Twitter Accounts. It revealed some interesting statistics. The going rate for purchasing fake followers at the time was $18.00 per 1,000 followers. Out of the 72,212 accounts analysed there were 11,283 ââ¬Ëabusersââ¬â¢ ââ¬â those who had acquired for themselves at least 470 fake followers.
Are these little digital beasties a threat to social media? Does it matter anyway?
If you look at the influence of social media in society today, both in our social culture and in a business context, the answer is yes. Those who actively procure fake followers tend to do so to promote themselves in search and gain a higher influence. With higher influence come other benefits, like advertising revenue streams. The Baracuda Labs survey found that 75 per cent of abusers (those who buy fake followers) have set a URL in their profiles (compared to 31 per cent for random Twitter users). This URL is used to sell advertising. Those who suffer fake following will often follow back manually, view the profile, click the URL and then see the advertising. They are also often subjected to @ spam.
What can you do if you have been the subject of fake followers? You can report to Twitter using a very simple process. If the fake followers are spamming you, then this is separately an infringement of your privacy rights ââ¬â you have not opted in to receive spam from the fake followers.
But the moral of the story is really this: think before you Tweet and think before you follow.
