Twitter influential members – Are your followers real people or a hoax?

One of the practices widely used to build up influence on Twitter is using third party software to systematically add a large number of social connections each day, then breaking those connections with anyone who doesn’t reciprocate. Such a practice allows people to grow their list of followers fast and automatically without any close monitoring.

Some social media companies sell the dream of building an influential account for someone in few weeks without contributing any real content by using the above techniques for monitory compensation.

The question that comes to my mind is, when you are building these lists automatically and when you can build them that fast, are you monitoring whether you are adding real people or just hoaxes?

Twitter has been so busy banning and suspending spammers and people who were adding large numbers of people to their follower list, that they have totally forgotten about a larger issue. Follower farms are used illegally to build influence and cheat people.

What are follower farms?

Follower farms are generated lists of followers that have a scrambled nonsense name, no real user first or last name, no web link and not even a description or a single contribution. They take the shape of Alizxdtys with a name of AAlizxdtys or Alizxdtys. It is not hard to spot follower farms because when they attach themselves to your profile they come in group of tens and hundreds at a time which will inflate the number of your followers immediately. When you look at the list of your followers you will see they come in serial random numbers like Alixeddd1, Alixeddd2, Alixedde4, Alixedde5, Nedadrty5a, and Nedadrty5b.

Results of consequences:

The immediate results of being attacked by these spamming farms are your number of followers grows fast.  But I am not sure:

  • Why would you want thousands of followers who are not human?
  • What would happen to your reputation and influence when your number of followers drop by thousands as a results of these farms leaving you?
  • Are scammers in social media using these farms to trick people and steal their money after selling them an influential account while in reality it is all a hoax?

My biggest question is what Twitter is doing to fight these farms. We know what Google has done for linking farms, is Twitter going to get busy with this real problem instead of going after real people who are adding other people to their account?

What should you do to avoid followers farms?

  1. Keep a close eye to your follower account, even if you use third party software. Only a human eye can detect these farms and only you can prevent your software for following these scammers.
  2. Always scan the list of your followers even randomly. Believe me, it is not hard to spot these farms and unfollow them.
  3. Do not engage a social  media company that is not known and promises big influential accounts for extremely low prices, because a good, robust, influential account needs time and content to be built.

A quality Social Media Company like Solution416 takes more than few months to build you a profile with content and you should not accept anything less.

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