Fake Followers On Social Media Can Damage Your Business

Nothing is sweeter than watching your number of followers on social media grow everyday. But with the growing number of fans, you begin to doubt whether your brand has genuine followers or fake ones. You begin to think of the negative repercussions of these fake followers on your brand value. Well, you are right to be concerned. Social media is an integral part of digital marketing today. It has become important to search engine optimization strategies as well. With the number of social media users increasing day by day, it is difficult to figure out whether the user is real or not. There are a lot of fake user accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. Not only individuals engage in creating fake accounts, but companies or brands too create unreal accounts to attract traffic, get clicks to their website and increase ranking.

Millions of social media users are actually fraudulent bots used for the purpose of skyrocketing the number of followers. A huge number of fans on social media makes the person or brand look influential. Twitter and Instagram have a great problem with fake users. Businesses are afraid of creating and publishing amazing content on social media and then have no one see it. They actually want the audience to see their content and engage with it. Last but not the least, they want the engaged audience to convert.

Business do whatever is required to gain the maximum engagement of audience. Since 40% of B2B marketers predicted that social media content would be one of the most critical tactics for content marketing success in 2017 and beyond, the businesses put their all efforts in creating excellent quality content for social media followers’ consumption. When they lack the number of fans on social media, buying followers starts to look the only resort left to improve their social media stats. The main idea behind buying followers is that it will make the brand look significant and encourage others to follow the brand. The downside of this strategy is that it doesn’t work always.

Fake followers impact the engagement rate. It can even get the social account flagged and suspended. Hence, having fake followers on social accounts can hurt the brand image big time. Fake followers greatly impact the performance metrics too. This happens because valueless social accounts respond poorly to the communication shared on the channels. From likes to shares, they result in low engagement rate further hampering overall performance of the social campaign.

There stands a big limitation when it comes to Facebook as you cannot see all your followers. But on Twitter and Instagram you have the complete list of followers in front of you. This helps you audit them for signs of being fake. When you’re done identifying the fakes on your account, you need to immediately remove them. It is strongly recommended that you block and report them. Reporting false users helps social media channels such as Twitter & Instagram to find them and take action against them. This will help you filter out quality audience who are more useful to you. Further, this quality fan base will help you improve conversion rate.

Keep an eye on your new followers. Also, keep your marketing strategy and implementation under check on a regular basis. Work on making social media strategies that will help you gain real fans and followers. The followers grown organically are sure to attract high-quality followers on your social media platforms.