Image: Jorge Quinteros
Many bloggers spend months – maybe even years – building their audience. Conversations started on blogs can be continued on Twitter and Facebook.
To bloggers this is just fun, but to brands it’s a huge opportunity – by securing coverage on a blog, they gain access to that blogger’s “network” – in other words, all the people your posts can potentially reach.
The problem is that, as blogging becomes more commercial, there’s a huge temptation for bloggers (and brands) to try and make their network appear bigger. After all, if your network reaches 1m people, brands will pay much more to appear on your site.
And artificially inflating your network is alarmingly easy to do.
Did you know that for $100 you can buy 5,000 Twitter followers? Or that $500 will buy you 4,000 Facebook likes, or 10,000 ‘plus ones’ on your Google+ page? Scary, isn’t it?
Of course, buying followers and fans is also completely stupid. Here’s why:
Problem 1: Being Called Out is No Fun
The chances of being found out are high, when people notice your social media digits doubling or more overnight. Being called out as a digital faker won’t do your reputation any good.
Problem 2: It’s a dishonest way to do business
If you are using fake accounts to boost your network and then using that influence as a way to secure payment or products from brands and PR agencies, you can be sure they’re going to take a dim view of your dishonesty if they find out. There’s a great post on this issue by Zach Bussey.
Problem 3: Fake Followers Don’t Talk Back
Third (and perhaps most importantly) fake followers don’t talk back. They don’t read your blog, or share your content, or buy your products. To put it bluntly, they don’t count. They’re boring. For more on this, you must read this really interesting post from Rabbit Agency, who found that even if they offered $10 to fake followers in exchange for a Tweet, nobody talked back.
So what can PR execs do?
If you’re a brand or PR working with bloggers in any field, perhaps the most important thing to remember is not to take network figures at face value – especially when you’re spending your client’s money. Sure, it can be difficult to definitively prove someone’s a faker, but there are ways to assess the validity of someone’s network.
- Look at interaction versus network growth – a follower count that grows out of all proportion with the number of social mentions is probably fake.
- Use websites such as Status People, which can quickly analyse someone’s Twitter followers and come up with a likely number of fake followers, and inactive followers. Anything over 20% should be ringing alarm bells.
- If you’re looking at G+, use Circlecount to analyse someone’s followers, and track growth over time. Sudden spikes that don’t correlate to any content, or an increase in interaction, should raise BIG red flags.
- You can also check demographics of the people following an account on both G+ and Twitter – sites like Social Statistics let you quickly see the country followers come from, as well as breakdown by likely gender.
What should bloggers know?
Great stats are useful when working with brands – but be confident that your audience, and your interaction is GOOD ENOUGH as it is. And if it’s not quite good enough yet for a particular brand or project, then perhaps it will be over time. Or perhaps it will be a better fit for someone else, down the line. Your stats can always grow – but recovering your integrity and reputation after faking your figures might be a little harder to do.
About Sally
Sally Whittle is founder of the Tots100, Foodies100, BlogSummit and the MAD Blog Awards. When she's not working, she can be found blogging at Who's the Mummy, or having fun with her 7 year old daughter, Flea.
A great article, can’t believe that people can do that. Isn’t the same as cheating at school. At the end of the day your only cheating yourself – definitely not worth it
Yes, you’re cheating yourself – but also your clients and your genuine followers too!
Wow, didn’t know that was happening!
More common than you might think, sadly
If you’re buying followers, you don’t get social media.
Word.
Active engagement is the only thing that matters – if you only have 10 followers but they hang on your every word, buy the products you review, share content with their friends and act as brand ambassadors they are worth a million times more than 10,000 followers who just lazily clicked ‘like’ one day. I’m always having to explain this to brands who think that the more followers / likes you have the better.
I think if there was a trend to educate PR professionals about SEO, the next wave will be educating PRs to understand social media metrics – it’s an area that’s new to all of us, and it’s easier in the early days to think big numbers = automatically better, isn’t it?
I am FOREVER talking to clients about understanding metrics but also querying them – how does someone back up those numbers, how current are they, what’s the data quality like, can it be verified on a second source?
This is really good to see written down. There are no two ways about it, buying followers is deceitful, unethical and downright dumb. When I saw this happening recently I voted with my feet and walked away. Why anyone thinks it’s an acceptable way to behave is totally beyond me.
I’m sure nobody thinks it’s acceptable! Hope so, at any rate.
I read a great article the other day about buying followers and fake profiles. This bloke did it and basically it whipped up a whole load of trouble. He started to get strange messages posted on his facebook wall, spam links were coming in quicker than her could delete them.
It’s an interesting subject.
Ooh, that’s interesting – would love to see the link.
I have 2.5 words to say on this.
[redacted]
(sorry I needed to get that off my chest)
I’m sorry we moderated this comment Annie – but the point of our post is to raise awareness among bloggers and brands, and certainly not to speculate on any individuals – in addition to being potentially libellous (not good news for you OR us) it’s not the way we do things
this is so true – I also think that posting competitions on competition firm things and such like then asking for people to follow your blog as a condition of entry is also wrong – I’d rather host a competition for genuine readers/followers and grow organically rather than with artificially inflated figures!
That’s how I feel as well, Super Amazing Mum. But surprisingly enough many bloggers, even those who have already big number of followers, insist on doing that.
It’s scary, isn’t it?
Hi Super Amazing Mum *waves* Have to say, I don’t agree with you completely there. If you are a parenting blog, for example, and you give away parenting prizes then the people who enter are likely to be your target readership. I wouldn’t make following / subscribing a *condition* of entry, but I do think it makes sense to make it an option for bonus entries. Incentives are an age old marketing tool. It’s no different from magazines that offer some freebies to new subscribers, really. I think relevant incentivisation of real followers isn’t the same as buying totally fake followers by a long way.
This is exactly what I was going to say, as well. I never make following any sort of condition of entry, but it is always an optional extra entry. I have found that those who take the time to follow or like me will then interact with me in future. Not all of them, obviously, but enough to make me feel that it was a good idea.
Personally, when I enter competitions, I will do the whole like/follow thing to get the extra entries, and I will watch the FB page or get the email newsletter for a week or so, but if they don’t post good content, I will unsubscribe or unlike the page. It’s up to them to keep me engaged.
I agree Emily. And if you are running a competition for a company who want to grow their audience then Facebook ‘likes’ and twitter ‘follows’ are par for the course. I’ve personally found loads of new social media relationships in this manner, ditched the ones who were irrelevant.
But actually *buying* followers is pretty damned ridiculous, desperate and hugely dishonest.
People are always going to try and extort the system – and they’re always going to get found out. Huge numbers may look impressive at first glance but none of that is useful if it is unused.
Hence our post – it’s important people understand how to engage with numbers critically. You’ll never EVER stop people over-stating their stats, but if you know how to read them and put them in context, you’ll avoid wasting your client’s budget next time.
This is something that I’ve been watching for a while now – I know of couple of shocking examples of this and wonder daily whether to call them out on it. In the meantime, I tell every single PR that will listen that the person they think to be influential is only so if they are targeting bots! The majority of us work so hard to build up an audience and a good Twitter reputation that it is just depressing to see a few try to take the fast track. I think it is fraudulent. If you look at the definition of fraud it is (something like..) obtaining goods/money under false pretences, so surely implying you are more popular than you are in an influential arena, taking ‘freebies’ based on smoke and mirrors and accepting paid work on the basis of a lie has to be fraud..doesn’t it?
I must confess, I was very surprised to see this happening in the UK. It’s very much a minority but I think the best thing we can do is educate the community about engaging critically with numbers and understanding metrics much better.
And yes, I do agree on the fraud question, although I’m certainly not a legal expert.
Do people lie about their stats? can’t they just be found out anyway?
My followers have all slowly grown but I would be curious to see how many interact with me rather than just stick around for a competition, I like a good old chat so I wished some would be more chatty. I was really gullible before blogging & would believe that the followers was all real people, blogging has opened my eyes. Great post
Stats can sometimes be found out independently but mostly it’s a matter of trust – and if people don’t understand the technology platforms involved, people can easily be “overly optimistic” about their network – for whatever reason.
I had never even heard of this. My goodness! What’s wrong with a bit of hard work?
Well, quite! And faking it isn’t as much fun as actually having conversations, surely!
VERY interesting article. I wasn’t even aware this kind of thing happened. It’s extremely sad that anyone would want to do this and sacrifice losing a place in a well respected and all round fabulous community.
We definitely agree with THAT sentiment!
I was well aware of it as they keep trying to get me to “buy” followers. They fail to see I am not interested in bought followers, only those who are genuinely interested in Coombe Mill Holidays and parenting chat through my blog.
Surely for those making money from blogging and gaining paid for fake followers it will be come obvious to brands in no time that the followers are not delivering the results they hoped for and could back fire for those with real followers!
We would have thought so – how sad, but we often get the same offers to buy followers, we’d just never risk it!
What a brilliant article. Such compelling reading – I suppose I was aware of it but just didn’t know how much of this stuff really went on. Down with the cheats and the fakers I say! Ypu’d have to be an idiot to think doing this would make you a credible prospect for working with a brand or to your public! #boo
Thanks, really glad you enjoyed the post!
I’ve come across a blog which has hundreds of thousands of views a month according to their stats counter. Everytime I go and check it out in incredulation I watch the stats counter rise twenty-thirty views within a matter of a minute. And yet it’s nowhere to be seen on any charts…
Cripes. Although visits can sometimes be out of whack with charts, so you never know…
I guess the thing is – if you’re going to exaggerate, make it believable. Tripling your follower count is going to be noticed, so is getting 10000 likes instantly and page views that would put you in the league of your own in the parent blogging world yet you aren’t near the top of the rankings is going to ring large bells of doubt in people’s mind.
Is that a bit like when I tell people I’m five feet five?
Great article, I have sometimes wondered how some people managed to have so many followers in a short space of time!
Thanks for taking the time to explain it all!