And not only that. At first, the fake followers were nothing more than a large number of inactive accounts that served to fatten other accounts. They were easy to spot, as most of them had the famous egg as a 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 do you get 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 the beads look as natural as possible. They will follow you, randomly “like” some of your tweets, 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
Accounts of this type are profiles lacking activity. They usually don’t have a profile picture. If they do, we recommend that you right-click and Google the image. With total security, the Photo of the profile will be stolen or will belong to a bank out of stock of pictures. They typically follow several hundred or thousands of users and they don’t usually have followers. They also do not usually write any type of tweet, although if they have a history in the timeline, the normal thing is that they are totally incoherent publications, interacting with repeated patterns and without a biography. These types of “users” are generally easy to spot.
These accounts are created in a massive way by companies that sell followers on social networks. Nowadays 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 failed to solve during Jack Dorsey’s second stage as CEO of the social network. Captcha systems have proven not powerful enough to slow down the horde of bots what has flooded the social network, especially when elections are coming up 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 especially 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 tend to interact with each other, mostly using images of humans generated by neural networks or directly using all kinds of photographs screaped of profiles of other social networks to falsify an identity that doesn’t really exist.
Why are you interested in removing them?
Does Pedro Sánchez have too many fake followers? It depends. Donald Trump, had more than 72% of fake followers before being banned from Twitter.
They damage your credibility
This problem does not affect personal accounts too much, but it does affect projects, companies and organizations. Eliminating your fake followers can be positive for your networks, since they will not be able to accuse you of being fattening your numbers.
Many of your users were once real
This other problem is very common. We all have people that we follow and follow us on Twitter for years. People we even know in person, but whose accounts no longer belong to thembut were stolen and are used to send spam. Many may seem inactive, but sometimes, but sooner or later, hackers who have access to these accounts end up using them.
Damage your engadgement
The engadgement has become the center of everything on networks like YouTube, where the number of followers does not matter that you have, but your ability to connect with your audience and that it interacts with your content. Twitter also has its algorithms, and shows us only the tweets that the network considers that we may be interested. Having our profile full of users who will never interact with us too can be harmful for our profile, since they will never give us a “like”, a “retweet” or comment on us.
Tools to detect fake followers
Next, we will show you some of the best tools that you can use to analyze how fake your audience is on Twitter:
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 we choose and detecting all kinds of fake or inactive accounts of any profile .
SparkToro
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 will give you a report of the percentage of fake followers that has the account you have analyzed, 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 detect inactive accounts of Twitter how to detect fake followers. In this way, you can easily clean your profile on the social network. It will also show you a list of spammers, users that generate too much noise or even accounts that you follow that publish in other languages and that Twitter tends to hide from you. The service is much more complete and has more tools, but these that we will tell you They are inside the Twitter Circle section by Circleboom. The price varies depending on the number of tools you need.
