It’s happened to everybody – you start up your new social media account, begin unloading your revolutionary thoughts onto the world and you get the wonderful notification that a complete stranger wants to follow your social media activity, says Mitesh Patel, business growth strategist at Solution Analysts.
However, you then quickly find out that the follower is a programmed bot, a barely used account or a scammer using someone’s bikini-clad image as their profile picture. In other words, someone that doesn’t care what you had for breakfast this morning.
Fake users dominate the Internet. According to The Atlantic, over half of the Internet traffic is due to bots – and social media is no different.
These fake accounts do more than just gunk up one’s follower base. Fake followers have also disrupted the billion dollar industry of influencer marketing, where a company will invest in a social media account to promote its product.
Just how much do you get for acclimating followers and participating in influencer marketing? According to Forbes, an Instagram account with 100 000 followers can usually make $5 000 for a sponsored post.
However, this gets complicated once fake followers are accounted for. In fact, in order to prove just how easy it is to take advantage of influencer marketing, Internet marketing agency MediaKix used some previously existing images and stock photos to create Instagram accounts, purchasing followers and engagement.
The accounts accumulated thousands of fake followers, even going on to generate their own sponsorship deals, with free products and even cash offered to the (fake) owners of the fabricated accounts.
This proves one of the largest issues within the community: using money to expand a social media following.
The fake follower economy definitely has far-reaching consequences. Not only does it damage the influencer marketing world, it has also turned social media growth into another money making opportunity for the platforms.
Luckily, there are ways to avoid gaining a follower base of purely bots, scammers or both. Online tools such as Twitter Audit can help users identify how real those followers can be. With 'fake news' and now 'fake people', it’s up to Internet users to stay informed and savvy in the modern era of online mistrust.
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