This is the second of a two part series about fake followers. Part one was posted last week.

So how many fake Twitter followers do you have?

For Twitter it is possible for you to clean up the people who you are following, and there are many tools for that. However, you have only a few options (see below) over who chooses to follow you… unless you plunge into the murky waters and buy fakes! Be careful of your company colleagues (or your agencies) looking at this quick win. It is a false win in so many ways!

Here are some example results as of today:

To be balanced, what about my own accounts? As of today:

1-5% is typical of personal accounts. Celebrity and well known business accounts do attract higher fake followers of one type or another.

Inactive accounts are not all dead accounts. Some people use Twitter to read tweets or to do research and do not create tweets, retweet etc, so do not count all inactive as dead accounts.

I also analyzed Twitter accounts of people who sell fake Twitter accounts. In my research I found that they fell into 2 categories:
 - They did not bother to have hardly any followers at all.. or
- They loaded up with as many fakes as they could use!

You can work out your own using http://fakers.statuspeople.com/

Are fake accounts harmful?

Some fake accounts are just a harmless fake name, maybe no bio and no profile picture, but some are more dangerous. Some might be hackers and internet criminals that may send out malicious Twitter bots to follow you. There are some options available, like protecting tweets, reporting accounts and blocking accounts. Here is a blog post by Netsecurity.about.com with more information on these options.

How do you feel about fake followers?

If you know me, you will know that this topic is one that really gets me going! Red hot! The sellers of fakes often turn up on accounts without an invite. On my Facebook fan page I sometimes get a message like “I added 2 followers to your page so if you want more just go to…” and how often do you find comments on your Instagram posts from sellers promoting fake likes. Grrrrr! So what you you think about fakes?

This is the second of a two part series about fake followers. Part one was posted last week.

________________________________________________________

About The Author:
Clive Roach is the social media strategist for Philips Healthcare. He is active with strategy development, activation, governance, projects and educational training activities for all aspects of social media within Philips Healthcare. Clive has been working in the eMarketing area since 1997, and previously held roles in engineering, design and sales. Clive is also practical in addition to his current strategic role. In addition to this blog, he tweets daily on three Twitter accounts, has two Facebook fan pages, Google+, Pinterest, So.cl, Instagram, and participates in many other social networks.

Connect with the author via: Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn | Facebook fan page | SlideShare

This is the first of a two part series about fake followers. Part two will be posted next week.

Being fake is not new.

Years ago we had fake web sites (Phishing) and spam email etc..
Now Social media is the target of the fakers, that’s life I guess.

After spending some time venturing into social media, you will no doubt come face to face with fake accounts. Then you might get accustomed to the give away signs of a fake follower. They are become ever more sophisticated. Years ago, it was very easy to spot them. I could see new accounts created after 10 days or so having 1000’s of followers when they only tweeted 5 or so times. How can that be? It just did not add up.

Twitter is not the only target of the fake accounts. There are people selling fake Pinterest, Facebook and YouTube followers or subscribers.
Years ago I spent some time looking at fake Facebook accounts. I recall seeing 100s with smiling profile pictures, but they had not posts on their wall. They all had the same personal data, like religion, political affiliation, and favorite topics like food, films, travel.

Selling fake is now big business for some people.

Earning a living being fake? Some people seem to choose this as a career. The New York Times highlighted this recently with their post “Fake Twitter Followers Become Multimillion-Dollar Business”. 

This is obviously not exclusive to the online domain, and this story gives a new meaning to “BIG business” - A conman made £50million by selling fake bomb detectors based on £13 novelty golf ball finders.

Do we all have fake followers?

Almost all Twitter accounts have at least some fake followers of one type or another. Here are 10 easy ways to spot fake Twitter followers.

Buying fake followers for company accounts is just not clever at all. It was not easy to work out the fake % of twitter accounts years ago, but today there are many free services available. A quick win to buy fake accounts years ago to boost your account standing is a brand reputation killer now that we can all work out your fake follower %. This might of been seen as a way to avoid a new Twitter account looking “new”. It reminds me of the advice I read when I first made web sites in the early 1990s, which was to inflate the web site vists/visitor counter at the launch of a new website. The counters were very commonplace on web sites at that time.

What is the benefit anyway? Tweeting to fake followers is a waste of time and fake followers make engagement, social status and influence statistics extremely poor.

Here is an infograhic created by SocialsellingU.com, presented by Insideview.

How do you feel about fake followers?

If you know me, you will know that this topic is one that really gets me going! Red hot! The sellers of fakes often turn up on accounts without an invite. On my Facebook fan page I sometimes get a message like “I added 2 followers to your page so if you want more just go to…” and how often do you find comments on your Instagram posts from sellers promoting fake likes. Grrrrr! So what you you think about fakes?

Part two of this series about fake followers next week.

________________________________________________________

About The Author:
Clive Roach is the social media strategist for Philips Healthcare. He is active with strategy development, activation, governance, projects and educational training activities for all aspects of social media within Philips Healthcare. Clive has been working in the eMarketing area since 1997, and previously held roles in engineering, design and sales. Clive is also practical in addition to his current strategic role. In addition to this blog, he tweets daily on three Twitter accounts, has two Facebook fan pages, Google+, Pinterest, So.cl, Instagram, and participates in many other social networks.

Connect with the author via: Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn | Facebook fan page | SlideShare

I have been following the Symplur blog for a while, and they do some great things with tracking how Twitter works with Healthcare conferences, especially hashtags. Here are some findings from one of the conferences they tracked last year, the “Doctors 2.0 & You” conference that took place in Paris in May 2012. Essentially tracking conversations featuring the #doctors20 conference hashtag.

Some of the key Findings from the Symplur Healthcare Conference Study.

•    There were more virtual participants (592) than participants that were physically present at the location (400). This illustrates both the power of social media, and the powerful impact the thought-leaders at the Doctors 2.0 & You conference created as their ideas went viral across the globe.
•    The 4,999 total tweets created significant awareness of the ideas shared by the presenters at the conference with a total of 11,969,612 potential impressions in Twitter users’ tweet streams.
•    There was great diversity in languages used by the social participants with English, French and Spanish being the top three, followed by Dutch, Italian, and German.
•    The second day of the conference created the highest volume of social conversations with a total of 2,858 tweets.
•    The social peak of the conference took place at noon the second day when Jen Dyer MD, MPH (@endogoddess) presented on how mobile apps and social media can be a powerful way to improve health literacy. This hour alone generated over 500 tweets.
•    Patients were strongly represented at the conference being one of the main segments or social influencers.
•    Looking at the top 50 influencers, they found that Doctors made up the largest group (12). They were followed by Consultants (8), and Patients (7).
•    From analyzing the hashtags used during the conference, they identified some of the main topics discussed including “Healthcare Social Media”, “Mobile Health”, “Pharma”, “ePatients” and “eHealth”.

5 tips for enabling the social buzz at an event

Hashtags are not the only factor to enable effective social media buzz around a conference event. Here are four others;

1) Event hashtag
2) Reliable wireless network
3) Great content
4) Use a location based service like Foursquare to create a place for people to checkin at your event.
5) Drive the back-channel conversation and display event hashtag tweets.

Read more about this topic here.

There are many options available to track Twitter activity during conference events, like the surge in real time Twitter analytics.


I work for a Healthcare company, helping to drive the social media adoption in events, and I am always impressed by what we achieve year on year. If Healthcare can progress with Twitter at events as shown by the findings by Symplur, imagine what other industries could do!

________________________________________________________

About The Author:
Clive Roach is the social media strategist for Philips Healthcare. He is active with strategy development, activation, governance, projects and educational training activities for all aspects of social media within Philips Healthcare. Clive has been working in the eMarketing area since 1997, and previously held roles in engineering, design and sales. Clive is also practical in addition to his current strategic role. In addition to this blog, he tweets daily on three Twitter accounts, has two Facebook fan pages, Google+, Pinterest, So.cl, Instagram, and participates in many other social networks.

Connect with the author via: Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn | Facebook fan page | SlideShare

I have recently started to feature the wide range of hashtags from Instagram in my Social Media training, as I have found that almost any subject has been featured as a hashtag. I work for a Healthcare company and it is amazing to see how #cardiology and #radiology and many others have been featured in Instagram. Vine also has posts that include these hashtags as well. So checkout the most relevant hashtags for your key business areas in Instagram, you just might be surprised!

Here is how Vine compares to Instagram

Dan Zarrella of Hubspot has released his latest research and it is about how Hashtags work on Instagram.

I use this site to see what the most popular Instagram hashtags are at that moment in time.

________________________________________________________

About The Author:
Clive Roach is the social media strategist for Philips Healthcare. He is active with strategy development, activation, governance, projects and educational training activities for all aspects of social media within Philips Healthcare. Clive has been working in the eMarketing area since 1997, and previously held roles in engineering, design and sales. Clive is also practical in addition to his current strategic role. In addition to this blog, he tweets daily on three Twitter accounts, has two Facebook fan pages, Google+, Pinterest, So.cl, Instagram, and participates in many other social networks.

Connect with the author via: Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn | Facebook fan page | SlideShare