Thanks to blogger Carl Shaw for this guest post.

I like to use social media and use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram every day even if it’s just to check out how my posts are being viewed or what everyone else is posting. There have been some internet stories recently about how some businesses are manipulating the statistics that many people use to judge how popular something is. Yes we are “sheeple” and I will admit that I like to follow the crowd, re-tweeting popular things that I see and liking or following posts or accounts that say something profound or make me chuckle.

It is true that by adding to an author’s amount of followers, re-tweets or likes it makes it more likely that others will also view a post or account so I can definitely see why it is done. I get a little thrill when someone likes a post I make or follows me so I can imagine how it would be to have hundreds or even thousands suddenly jumping onto my account making me seem much more popular.

The Fake Social Media Account Phenomenon

There seems to be two ways that the fake accounts or at least the accounts that I have been able to find that look fake, are made. One method is by having teams of overseas workers making accounts manually. This can be time consuming and has led many social media companies to look for accounts created from the same IP addresses in a short amount of time. The second method is using a bot to create accounts in an automated process. This can be seen by having blank account information and sometimes even uses numbers in the account names that can be very easy to spot.

In an effort to avoid these obvious problems which are easy to spot and make them ineffective there are a new generation of providers that have moved away from generating huge numbers of low quality accounts that have limited use and instead are concentrating on creating quality accounts that look and behave like a real account. This has made them undetectable because they use proper names and have a history of use that is ongoing.

While there are still many offerings for the easily detected and obviously fake followers how can we even be sure how widespread the use of these new generation fake accounts are? They are not being detected and reported and I have looked extensively on the internet and have not seen anything that talks about it. It seems that it is impossible to pick real from illusion.

Price and Effectiveness

There has been a large drop over the last few years as more businesses set up and try to make money by selling fake social media likes, followers and re-tweets across the different platforms. The area that seems to be attracting the most attention lately is Twitter. There are literally hundreds of businesses that advertise how you can buy twitter followers for prices that are dirt cheap.

The trend is that the more you buy the cheaper it is and easily detected followers from lower quality providers are not any cheaper than the higher quality followers on offer. You can expect to pay anywhere from a few pence or cents each to fractions of a penny or a cent each for large numbers of followers.

There does not seem to be more than anecdotal evidence about how effective or ineffective buying followers can be. What has been seen is the negative publicity that has been generated by the use of fake social media statistic building. It seems pretty clear that if you do decide to use this sort of a service then make sure it is not going to flood you with bad followers that are obviously fake.

Social Media Companies Do Not Seem Interested In Fakes

It seems strange to me that these media behemoths have not stamped this practice out. It has been going on publicly for many years. There have been moves in recent times against accounts that are obviously fake but even they are patchy at best and do not seem to be a priority.

While there have been a few notable users caught out there has not been an outcry from users, businesses that use social media or social media companies themselves. So what is the big deal then? It is hard to say, I mean we all want everything to be fair and even but it isn’t. Money gets you bigger, better and faster in all things in life so that may explain why this just isn’t important to some people. If they want to spend some money improving their followers in the hope of getting a bigger audience then let them. If they have nothing interesting to say then in the end it is not going to make any difference and if they do have something interesting then maybe it’s even a good idea.

What I Think

If you want to try this then be smart. It is obvious that using bad accounts are not worth the effort so you need to find a business that has a track record of providing fake followers from good accounts that will pass any inspection. Having the ability to ensure that these followers stay active in the long term is also a big plus. So is you want to cheat a little, yes it is cheating, then do it the right way that will not blow up in your face. I strongly suspect that this is happening a lot more than many people may think so join the rest of them and do it the right way so no one but you knows.

Some of the information used in the article was taken from the followersboosts.com website. They use a similar system to that described above and is undetectable.

So, what do you think? Is it worth a few bucks to “make the party look bigger” on your author website?