Buying fans and followers: how to spot them?

Back in 2015, don’t worry if the number of “Likes” on your business page suddenly dropped. Facebook “updated the way it measures the people who like your Page”1. A clean-up that could benefit your business in the short term if your competitors had bought lots of fans that are now inactive and removed by this Facebook update.

facebook message buying fans

Message published by Facebook before March 12, 2015 to warn about the removal of Likes from inactive accounts

In late 2015, it was Instagram, the photo-sharing social network owned by Facebook, that began purging fake accounts. The reason for this big clean-up? Mainly the arrival of advertising on Instagram, which pushes the social network to keep its numbers beyond reproach so as not to mislead advertisers.

Twitter also declared war on the fake accounts that proliferate on the social network. The microblogging site announced it wants to step up the fight. Indeed, Twitter provides forms to report abuse, which then allows it to manually review the most-reported accounts.

Since the GDPR, Google, in order to comply with the DGCCRF regulations, has been fighting against false information. This concerns fake local reviews and anonymous reviews on Google My Business pages, and therefore any review that doesn’t require you to identify yourself.

The fight against false information concerns not only fake local reviews, but also anonymous reviews, and therefore reviews written by people who cannot be identified by name. This, at least, is the signal that Google My Business now seems to want to send, following the launch of the GDPR, and above all to comply with the new DGCCRF regulations.

Buying fans and followers: a practice favored by artists and politicians

Generally speaking, these decisions illustrate the problem of buying fans and followers online to artificially improve the online reputation of companies or public figures. For $19 per 1,000 followers or $499 for Facebook fans, some companies don’t hesitate to artificially boost their visibility. This practice, which goes back several years, allows a company, for example, to display a high number of fans when launching a project. What’s more, being followed on social media by several hundred thousand or even millions of subscribers can help show a certain media importance, for example for politicians.

The profile of these fake accounts involved in buying fans and followers: software that shares on an industrial and random scale, and real accounts of people, usually from developing countries, who allow their profile to be used in exchange for credits, on platforms like Youlikehits.com.

This seems to be escalating among artists as well as politicians, in France and abroad. Despite the risks involved. For example, 30% of the followers of American politician Mitt Romney turn out to be fake profiles…

Audit of Mitt Romney’s followers provided by Twitteraudit

Buying fans and followers: a “very borderline” practice

Socialkik.com, Facebkfans.com, Socialpromotionz.com, Fanbullet.com, and Acheter-des-fans.com, like many other sites around the world, offer to increase subscribers or the number of followers for a few euros.

So 1,000 subscribers on Twitter or Facebook can sell for 99 euros. Legal or not? Prohibited by the terms of use of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, these fan purchases are not punished by law. “It’s very borderline, but so far we haven’t been bothered,” says Yannick Deslandes, the founder of the Acheter-des-fans.com site, interviewed by AFP2.

How to recognize fake profiles on Facebook?

To recognize fake Facebook profiles, one method is to analyze the activity of the various profiles. The website Coup de pub decided to take a closer look at the profiles of die-hard fans of a famous soft drink. And there, surprise: among the profiles visited, some have few friends and essentially limit themselves to sharing and commenting on the drink’s posts3.

Example of a profile that comments on and shares almost exclusively a brand’s posts

These profiles operate in a closed loop: they like each other, share each other’s content… There are also surprising Fanpages, with almost no fans, that do nothing but relay information about the brand in question. But since then, the company that produces this drink has insisted that “the number of fake profiles (FanPages + user profiles)” was “an isolated phenomenon,” and that they were “not aware of this practice”4.

On Twitter, how to spot fake accounts?

It is also possible to identify fake accounts on Twitter thanks to the microblogging site’s API: the language, country, number of tweets, and time zone of accounts are analyzed. Social media statistics sites like Socialbro.com can also help detect an account with many fake followers. For example, if 90% of the followers of a French reality TV contestant’s account are Chileans, there is a strong probability that the follower “seller” works with Chile.

Other signals can be analyzed:

Related to the very nature of the subscribers’ accounts: profiles with no avatar, accounts that don’t tweet, with very few subscriptions.
When the increase in followers is not natural.

Example with the accounts of Ségolène Royal and Anne Hidalgo:

Ségolène Royal’s Twitter account (source: https://www.journaldugeek.com/2014/03/10/compte-twitter-personnalites-politiques-manipulation-followers/)![Anne Hidalgo’s Twitter account](/media/2020/07/AH_compte_twitter-600x260.jpg)

Anne Hidalgo’s Twitter account (source: https://www.journaldugeek.com/2014/03/10/compte-twitter-personnalites-politiques-manipulation-followers/)

Sites like Social Bakers, Twitter Audit or Status People also offer an estimate of the percentage of fake subscribers on a Twitter account. Even if these tools are not always accurate, a significant number of “fakes” among the followers can raise the internet user’s suspicions about dubious practices.

After investigation, the website Tuxboard also noted the share of inactive accounts and fake accounts among the “followers” of certain politicians:

The politicians’ accounts examined by Tuxboard. Study from late 2014. Source: http://www.tuxboard.com/faux-abonnes-twitter-politiques/

How to know if someone has bought Instagram followers?

When an Instagram account has a large number of fake followers, it’s possible that they were bought. The easiest way to detect fake Instagram followers is to use the free tool Instagram Bot Analytics. If the Instagram account’s credibility score is low, you can then analyze its followers in more detail.

How to recognize a fake Instagram account? Here are several key points to check:

Does the Instagram account have a consistent following/followers ratio?
Has the account been fully set up?
Does the account post regularly?
Do the posted comments look like spam?

To analyze an Instagram profile in more depth, you can also use the paid tool HypeAuditor.

Illustration: hype auditor 700x438

From calling out fan and follower buying to negative SMO

Now very much aware of these practices, some internet users call them out in the media, on forums, or on social networks. Last year, well-known people, such as politicians on the web, who easily generate bad buzz, thus bore the brunt of these accusations.

As a result, we are seeing a kind of reverse effect, a sort of negative SEO applied to social networks — let’s call it negative SMO. To create bad buzz, it would be enough, for example, to exponentially increase an opposing politician’s account with foreign subscribers.

Prioritize quality over quantity on social media

For companies that don’t get called out, thanks to buying fake accounts, they can have a fan counter that makes the competition turn pale, or have more followers than there are inhabitants in certain French regions…20 But in the end, what about quality?

Buying fans and followers is negative for the brand’s reputation, with the risk of being called out, or of getting caught in the net of the platforms that fight against it. Ultimately, these purchases also lead to distorted campaign analysis and a loss of credibility. Is the game worth the candle?

Because having a large community is good, but having a community with a good engagement rate is better. Even if having a large community can generate a virtuous circle, you shouldn’t focus solely on it. What about the actual involvement of the bought fans and, if they do get involved, their credibility?

Nevertheless, the scope of these purchases should be put into perspective for some. “I think this practice is becoming less and less common,” explains Mikael Witwer, a marketing specialist at Asonvall, contacted by Semji. “Facebook has put in place restrictions to fight against these purchases. In the same way, its value is becoming less and less significant with the changes to EdgeRank (the algorithm that determines the visibility of Facebook posts shared in a Facebook user’s news feed, editor’s note). Qualifying fans is becoming a central element.”

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