Nothing is as overwhelming as witnessing the growing number of followers or fans on your social media pages. Isn’t it?
But have you ever wondered if these growing followers are real or not? What if they are the fake? What kind of negative impact can they bring to your brand if they are fake followers? You should be concerned of your followers.
Social media is an integral part of digital marketing today. It has become important to search engine optimization strategies as well. With the number of social media users increasing day by day, it is difficult to figure out whether the user is real or not. Yes, you read it right. There are a lot of fake user accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. Not only individuals engage in creating fake accounts, but companies or brands too create unreal accounts to attract traffic, get clicks to their website and increase ranking.
Millions of social media users are actually fraudulent bots used for the purpose of skyrocketing the number of followers. A huge number of fans on social media makes the person or brand look influential. Twitter and Instagram have a great problem with fake users.
In another scenario, businesses are afraid of creating and publishing amazing content on social media and then have no one see it. They actually want the audience to see their content and engage with it. Last but not the least, they want the engaged audience to convert.
With the aim to be on the top, every business does whatever is required to gain the maximum audience engagement. But not every strategy they make falls into place.
Since 40% of B2B marketers predicted that social media content would be one of the most critical tactics for content marketing success in 2017 and beyond, the businesses put their all efforts in creating excellent quality content for social media followers’ consumption. When they lack the number of fans on social media, buying followers starts to look the only resort left to improve their social media stats.
Again, as mentioned above, the main idea behind buying followers is that it will make the brand look significant and encourage others to follow the brand. The downside of this strategy is that it doesn’t work always.
3 Tips To Boost Your Social Media Presence
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Buying followers or even depending on fake followers to establish authority in the industry is not the right approach. Think again!
This is not going to help your social media metrics in the long run. What is going to help is the quality content and apt strategies to reach out the masses. Here are 3 tips to help you out with social media marketing.
#1 Be A Social Media Pro
Constantly feeding your fans with fresh information on a regular basis depicts authority in your domain in the eyes of your followers. Similarly, take out time to engage with them by sharing, liking or making their content favorite. Thank them for compliments and welcome new fans. You can also ask questions to initiate healthy discussion assuring them that you are an active account that craves their attention.
#2 Experiment With Diverse Content Types
It is important to share information or messages that are relevant to your industry. But it doesn’t hurt to feed your followers with something new and out of the box at regular intervals. Also, keep trying different formats of content such as infographics, videos, podcasts, quotes, news etc. to attract and engage the audience. By doing this you will prevent your followers from losing interest.
#3 Seek Attention
Every brand, business or individual craves for attention on social media. Sometimes, content is just not enough for attracting people. There is no harm in experimenting with different attention-grabbing activities to seek the attention of others. You can let people know about your existence with the aid of private messages, mentions, comments or sharing feedback. Be 100% genuine in whichever way you resort to.
How Fake Or Buying Followers Can Be Harmful
For marketers, the number of followers on their social accounts is an important asset. But valueless social accounts are good for nothing even if they are high in number.
Fake followers are worse than no followers at all. The challenge lies in finding out if the followers are fake or real. Well, there are many ways to find out how prevalent the followers are. But the easiest way is with the aid of technology. You can take help of a variety of precision-engineered online tools to find out which accounts are valuable and which are worthless. We shall get there later on. Before that, do understand how fake followers can hamper your social media marketing strategy.
Fake followers impact the engagement rate. It can even get the social account flagged and suspended. Hence, having fake followers on social accounts can hurt the brand image big time.
Please be noted that fake followers greatly impact the performance metrics too. This happens because valueless social accounts respond poorly to the communication shared on the channels. From likes to shares, they result in low engagement rate further hampering overall performance of the social campaign.
5 Apps & Tools to Help You Remove Fake Followers
Stop wasting money and time on fake followers NOW!
Here is a list of innovative tools that are effective in auditing your current followers on social media. There stands a big limitation when it comes to Facebook as you cannot see all your followers. But on Twitter and Instagram you have the complete list of followers in front of you. This helps you audit them for signs of being fake.
When you’re done identifying the fakes on your account, you need to immediately remove them. It is strongly recommended that you block and report them. Reporting false users helps social media channels such as Twitter & Instagram to find them and take action against them. This will help you filter out quality audience who are more useful to you. Further, this quality fan base will help you improve conversion rate.
If the number of fakes is higher than your expectation, take help of these tools to identify them and remove them improving quality of your followers.
1. Fakers
Rolled out by Status People, Fakers is a tool that scans your Twitter account thoroughly for the percentage of unreal accounts or followers. You need to connect your Twitter account with Fakers to run the test.
It categorizes accounts under Hall Of Shame and Popular Accounts lists. The popular list shows the % of fake audience rankings for high profile accounts. On the other hand, the hall of shame list consists the % of accounts with over 75% fake followers.
Fakers allow you to scan your accounts (single or multiple) unlimited times with 100% reliable results. Under its premium membership, it allows you to set it to auto-block. The tool can also continually monitor your account.
2. Crowdbabble
Crowdbabble is the perfect choice to find and remove your ghost followers on Instagram. When it successfully identifies the ghost followers for you, you can block them. The followers will be further removed from your follower list.
It is an insightful tool that uncovers brand’s most influential followers. In addition, it also gives information of the best time to post and which content works best. This enables a business to to ensure effective social media presence and delivers better results.
3. FakeFollowers
FakeFollowers is a new free tool from Socialbakers that allows you to assess how healthy your social profile is in terms of fans that follow you. Having inactive followers on your account can lower down your social performance for target audience as well as search engines.
Your association with the fake followers ruins brand’s reputation, decreases engagement and spams your news feed.
Providing accurate results, FakeFollowers has set the best standards for detecting fake profiles. Basis the results you can take actions immediately.
We suggest you perform the audit of your followers regularly preferably once every 6 months.
Get Legit Followers Only
Keep an eye on your new followers. Also, keep your marketing strategy and implementation under check on a regular basis. Work on making social media strategies that will help you gain real fans and followers. The followers grown organically are sure to attract high-quality followers on your social media platforms.
By highlighting the valid reasons to why fake followers are not good for your business, we warn you to stay away from them.
Have you ever experienced anything with regard to the fake followers on your social channels? What did you come across? What preventive measures did you take? Please share your experience in the comments below and enlighten all of us.
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