Social media accounts are a new form of currency and both influencers and enterprises want as many followers as possible to show the world how credible and popular they are. It’s a high school popularity contest all over again and just like in high school, the kid with the most friends gets the crown. Only this time, the whole world is fighting for that crown and the fame that comes with it.
According to the next web, Facebook revealed it had 1.23 billion monthly active users, 757 million daily active users, 945 million monthly active mobile users, and 556 million daily active mobile users. The company estimated that in 2013, between 5.5 percent and 11.2 percent of these users were fake.
It makes you wonder about how many of those friends, follows, likes and other forms of flattery are sincere. Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other channels have the same trouble with fake accounts. Some choose to ignore, while others, like Facebook plan to eliminate any bogus accounts.
Sometimes this annoying glitch can actually be taken in a positive light. There is even an award created for social media impersonators. The Shorty Awards allow you to nominate one of your favorite fake accounts. The awards have become as popular as their nominations and are only gaining speed with the number of fake accounts growing each day. Tips on creating killer accounts could come in handy when trying to get nominated for such awards.
Many buy fake followers in order to get their brand noticed and increase their importance. The larger the number of followers an account has the more likely people are to pay attention to it, but the problem is that these fake followers don’t create any sort of interaction and therefore engagement.
These fake accounts a.k.a. follower-bots act as real people and sometimes even steal content to seem like a real person. They shoot off posts and content and fool many.
Not only are the “posers” getting better, they’re getting smarter and making the purchase cost cheaper. The average price for purchasing followers has declined from $18 per 1,000 followers in 2012 to $11.18 per 1,000 followers. That means for $559, you could have 50,000 Twitter followers tomorrow.
Have you ever been tempted to increase traffic through fake followers? This infographic might interest you but even though intentions may be good, keep in mind that fake always equals fraud.
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