Internet is a wonderful place where you can get access for millions and millions of information. All thanks to Tim Berners – Lee. As the saying says, every situation have two sides of coin. In recent years, the behavior of using internet have been drifted.
You might wonder how your mutual friend who go to same school or workplace and spend most of the time with you have more friends and followers. Are they really popular or they have so much time to social with friends? There is something fishy happening between your number of followers on your account and his number of followers on his account.
These are some examples of social media accounts which potentially added bots as friend…..
Based on the profile, we can see that there is high number of followers for his profile while there is only fewer number of people that this user is following. There might be small percentage of his followers might be bots.
People that have large number of followers, they purchase followers. Picture below shows that one of the example of website where it allow user to purchase followers. According to NYTimes, it is a norm that celebrities or influencer would tend to buy likes, retweets, shares, and views through these websites as shown in the picture below.
This video entail the whole process of how influences and celebrities gain such huge amount of followers or retweets in short period of time. The number of likes and shares increase exponentially after the purchase. Of course, we do not know how true as it only mere as opinion. After all, every individual feel good after getting likes on their social media post right ?
How to detect a fake account on social media……
There are a lot of fake account as well in the social media be it Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. It is hard to differentiate between which account is fake and which account is real. So, based on the few articles, there is a way to detect a fake account on social media.
- Few photo being upload
Bots account does not post a lot of photos and their photos are not updated. The photo that posted by bots typically around 3 – 4. This is to create a illusion that the account is real behind the screen. The user might take the photo online or magazine or anywhere else. So, SCREEN THROUGH THE PHOTOS !
2. Post are minimal
Post on blogs are minimal such as 3 -5 posts but this users have like 500 – 600 hundreds of friends. It is obvious a red flag as it is impossible to have such minimal amount of post and non of your friend is commenting on your post.
There is certain amount of like consistently appear on his or her wall. It is weird that a user will have same number likes per post per day. Each post is different in terms of content. There might be different individuals who like the post. If the post is being like by certain people and the likes are consistent each of the post, it is an obvious sign that is a fake account.
3. Use tools
Certain businesses or individuals would use tools to detect fake account. According to Octoly Magazines, the most popular tools we can use to measure is SocialBlade. SocialBlade is a tool where it shows the most popular Instagram account and it able to help to track whether your favorite influencers are buying followers. This is the example of SocialBlades chart.
There are the other way as well to detect bots.
So, these are my opinion on how social media work on these days. It also give you tips on how to make those fake account user dissapears for good. If you have any ideas or opinion that you wish to share, feel free to comment bellow !
Disclaimer: Profile that shown in the blog are for illustration purposes. It is not for the purpose of mock or look down on individual.
How much do you know about Digital Marketing ? 
And in some form or another, there are motives behind buying followers. It could be as simple as for ego issues or as complicated as deceiving companies into working with them (eg the photographer) just to boost up their profile for engagements.
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Hi! Great read! I have learnt a lot on how to identify fake accounts! Have you watched the YouTube videos of Xiaxue and Dee Kosh collaboration where they reviews social media influencers’ Instagram accounts for the likelihood of whether they had bought followers for their accounts?
Xiaxue and Dee Kosh also used the app called Social Blade. You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62JRlyaIlX4
Buying followers is generally viewed as an unethical practice for social media influencers, as it inflates an account’s numbers to attract advertisers. It just like wasting the clients money on something that is not going to help them at all. I hope clients will be wise enough to choose to right influencers for their products.
By the way, do you know how much it is to engage a influencer to promote a product?
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waahh.. i feel so cheated by some of the influences that i followed! i thought they are popular which is why they had so much followers. But i guess, some of them really did “buy” followers. Xiaxue did a video of exposing those Singaporeans who bought their followers. Do go watch that video! It is pretty interesting.
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