Twitter Finally Cracks Down on Fake Twitter Followers

Twitter finally tightened the bolt on the fake Twitter followers epidemy this week, updating their security measures and follower count algorithm. Thousands of people that purchased fake followers have seen a lot of them disappear yesterday.

Tracking fake followers is very simple, even third party apps by Status People can do the trick. Most fake followers are inactive account that never do anything else but to follow lots of people, without ever commenting, engaging, or tweeting themselves. Twitter keeps track of such accounts for a few months, then once they are sure that these are fake accounts used to only deliver illegal followers to buyers, they then delete those accounts in bulk, resulting in a loss of followers on the accounts that bought them.

Twitter seem to be the easiest network to cheat, according to hackers and cheaters forums and social media marketing websites selling 5$ Twitter followers. Seems like Twitter let this phenomenon go for a long time, is it because it actually help them look more popular as a network? Did they take advantage of this ‘problem’ to build their reputation until they launched Twitter Trend and ads recently? It interesting to notice that Twitter themselves have over 30% fake followers on their own account… Whether they took advantage of this situation or not, they now charge $200 000 per day for advertisers to be featured as the Twitter Trend of the day.

It took Twitter way longer than its Social Media competitors to take measures against people who buy fake twitter followers for sale. Facebook cracked down on fake likes last September, when even celebrities like Justin Bieber saw their like count go down. Youtube followed in December 2012 by wiping over 2 Billion views off the Channels of major Record labels like Sony and Universal Music, and artists like Justin Bieber (again), Rihanna, Lady Gaga and many many more.

This will surely not stop fake twitter followers sellers, but will at least slow them down. Buying followers is the worst kept secret of the entire Social Media Marketing industry anyway, so most users don’t get fooled by it, but still according to Google Keyword tool over 200 000 per month search online for ‘buy twitter followers’ or ‘buy followers’!

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Mark Johnson lives and breathes social media. His articles have been published on over 40 social media blogs online. He also recently launched his mini-entrepreneur website called Mini Jobs List.

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