Guest Post|Why Fake Followers are Worse than No Followers
Follower count has become a social media metric that’s hard to ignore. It is a number displayed for everyone to see on every major social network, featured in every social media analytics report, and included in every social media influence score.
It is also a metric most naive senior level execs think is the most important number for social media because the more followers you have the better your social media presence is, right? Wrong.
The need for having more followers pre-dates many social media networks like Twitter and Facebook. This routes back to our social need to be popular, or the need to feel good about ourselves — our self esteem.
A big social media follower number can boost this feeling, which is why the act of buying fake followers is something that fulfills this desire to be popular. But, would you pay people to be your friend so you can feel popular? No (well, we hope not). So why would you buy fake followers on social media?
Buying fake followers can ultimately damage your social media presence and social media strategy. Just like buying fake friends. For example, if you have 3 million Twitter followers but out of the 3 million, each of your tweets only gets 30 retweets on average, that’s a really bad ratio and a clear indication that your followers are all fake. Now a days, the real people who visit your profile can see this and know that your Twitter following is fake.
With news revealing celebrities with fake followers and Instagram deleting fake followers, even the social networks are putting their foot down to ensure that their user experience are of high standards. On top of that, when you report on your social media initiatives, having a poor ratio like that will highlight the poor quality of your social media strategy.
Jayson DeMers illustrates this idea of quality followers by tying it to the Pareto Principle. This principle, also appropriately named the 80–20 rule, states that 80% of your results come from roughly 20% of your causes. What it means for your Twitter followers is that even if your business has reached the coveted first 1000 follower count, your message is amplified by as few as 200 of those followers — and that’s the best-case scenario! Despite warnings from social media professionals, follower buying practices are still widespread.
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