Far from slowing, the market for fake Twitter followers seems to be taking off.
The fake Twitter follower phenomenon made headlines last summer after
Mitt Romney’s Twitter following jumped by 100,000 in a matter of days.
That news inspired a number of social media management companies like StatusPeople and SocialBakers to develop Web tools that try to determine what percent of a person’s Twitter followings are fake.
But those sites have hardly deterred people from dealing in the
market for fake followers and fake retweets. The market is also becoming
more sophisticated. In many cases, high-quality false Twitter accounts
are nearly impossible to discern from the real thing. Those that sell
them claim that they can make up to a million dollars in one week.
Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, two Italian security
researchers, spent the last several months investigating the underground
economy for Twitter followers and said they had found a thriving
market.
There are now more than two dozen services that sell fake Twitter
accounts, but Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli said they limited
themselves to the most popular networks, forums and Web sites, which
include Fiverr,
SeoClerks, InterTwitter, FanMeNow, LikedSocial, SocialPresence and
Viral Media Boost. Based on the number of accounts for sale through
those services — and eliminating overlapping accounts — they estimate
that there are now as many as 20 million fake follower accounts.
Fake followers are typically sold in batches of one thousand to one
million accounts. The average price for 1,000 fake followers is $18,
according to one study by Barracuda Labs. Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli
said some sellers bragged that they made $2 and $30 per fake account. A
conservative estimate, they said, was that fake Twitter followers
offered potential for a $40 million to $360 million business.
Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli explored the underground economy for
fake followers. The market functions somewhat like eBay in that sellers
receive customer feedback. The researchers said they approached sellers
with positive feedback and found that fake followers were typically sold
in packages ranging from $1 to $1,000 for 1,000 to one million
accounts. For instance, Fiverr sells 1,000 Twitter followers for $5.
Those fake accounts can be sold to multiple buyers — in fact, buyers
prefer that the accounts follow others to make them appear more
authentic. Web tools that try to tell fake followers from real ones
often look at an account’s inactivity or its following-to-follower
ratio. The more people they follow and the more active they are, the
more authentic they appear.
“There is now software to create fake accounts,” Mr. De Micheli said
in an interview. “It fills in every detail. Some fake accounts look even
better than real accounts do.”
The most coveted fake accounts tweet (or retweet) constantly, have
profile pictures and complete bios, and some even link to Web sites that
they claim belong to them. But in many cases, a close look reveals that
some of the accounts were set up purely to retweet material from
specific sites.
“Resellers lately haven’t been selling only accounts and followers,
but are now getting into the retweet business,” Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De
Micheli wrote in a report. They said prices range between five retweets a
day for $9 per month to $150 a month for 125 daily retweets.
The Twitter account for
someone who claims to be Cilia Poon, for example, includes a bio, in
Chinese, a link to a Yahoo health blog with Chinese content and has
tweeted over 17,000 times — but each tweet was simply a retweet of a
tweet posted by The Next Web, a technology blog (in English), that wrote about the fake Twitter follower phenomenon
last December. Each time The Next Web Tweets its content, the Twitter
user Cilia Poon retweets its content right away. Digging further they
found several more examples of accounts that appear to exist solely to retweet content for The Next Web. (Some more convincing than others.)
Zee Kane, the chief executive of The Next Web, said the company was
aware of the accounts but had never paid for fake followers or retweets.
He said a likely explanation was that the company had created a tool,
called spread.us, that allows people to
automatically tweet its content. He said the company stopped marketing
that tool eight months ago because it did not add quality traffic to the
site.
Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli noted that while Facebook requires
that users use a real e-mail address, Twitter does no such thing. To
prevent fake accounts, or what are called “bots,” Twitter asks people
trying to create multiple accounts from the same I.P. address to answer a
“captcha.” Captchas — those puzzles used by e-commerce sites that
require people to type in a set of distorted letters and numbers — are
relatively easy for humans to read and retype but difficult for machines
to decipher. But the researchers point out that new software can beat
captchas, or people can be paid to type them in, in real time, for as
little as a penny per captcha, or even less.
The two spoke with one reseller who had written software that could create up to 100,000 new accounts in five days.
“Business is great,” he told them, adding that he had hired a couple
of freelance programmers, and that “a kid could bypass Twitter’s
defenses.”
Jim Prosser, a spokesman for Twitter, said the comparison between
Facebook’s and Twitter’s authentication processes was an ill fit.
“Twitter and Facebook differ on concepts of identity,” Mr. Prosser
said. “Facebook ties one person to one account. At Twitter, one
individual can have multiple accounts. We have a difference in
philosophy.”
Mr. Prosser said Twitter had taken an active role in fighting the
biggest sources of malicious and fake content.
Last year, the company
sued those responsible for five of the most-used spamming tools on the
site.
But he also noted the difficulty of telling a fake account from the
real thing. “Forty percent of our user base only consumes content,” he
said. “What looks like a fake account to one individual could actually
be someone who is on Twitter purely to follow people — like my mom, who
follows me and my brother, doesn’t have a profile bio and has never
actually Tweeted herself.”
He added, “It’s a hard problem.”
Get paid to tweet – $25 per hour!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By now, most of my regular readers have a pretty good handle on the ‘business model’ of this blog. In a nutshell, my strategy is simple: I write one article per week, post it, then spend the next six days trying to get people to actually read it. This recurring series of events can be a grind for an article marketer, but there is good news: it is definitely possible to significantly increase the distribution of your posts, articles and white papers WITHOUT spending every minute of your free time in front of a Netbook at Starbucks.
Now before I get too far into this, I need to make two very important points:
This strategy will take some time to implement.
If you stick with it, your results WILL improve every single month.
Translation: if you are lazy or impatient, you may stop reading immediately.
Regardless of what the sales rep at your local SEO company says, there is nothing quick, easy, or foolproof when it comes to capturing Internet traffic. It took me nearly 9 months to reach my 1,000th article Retweet (feel free to count them) and almost one-third were acquired in months 8 and 9. The sooner you realize actual effort will be required on your part, the more successful you will be in the long-term.
With the above in mind, here is an easy-to-follow, Twitter-based Article Marketing strategy involving our good friend, the Retweet.
Step #1: Use Your Existing Content to Fish for Retweets. If you’re a decent writer with a reasonable amount of real-world experience, chances are your blog already offers some pretty valuable content. Using your existing articles to generate a few Retweets will allow you to not only hit the ground running, but build a Retweet base for future articles (discussed in Step #3).
Because most serious article readers use hashtags to filter content, adding one to each of your Tweets is a no-brainer. If you write articles about gardening, end each Tweet with #gardening. If you write about coffee, use #coffee. Depending upon the nature of your articles, consider Tweeting an article several times during the course of a week, rotating between a handful of hashtags. Spending some quality time at Hashtags.org will generate plenty of great options to choose from.
To further boost your chances of a Retweet, many experts (OK, mostly me) believe labeling your Tweets with the word “Article” at the beginning can increase RT frequency from article readers. So can putting the words “RTs Welcome!” at the end. In addition, be sure to avoid the mistake of leaving too little room at the end of each article-related Tweet. Remember: most RT buttons add “RT @YourTwitterName” at the beginning of a Retweet, and serial Retweeters typically add comments like “Good read!” or “Nice article” to the end. Be sure to leave room for both.
Step #2: Show Your Retweeters Some Love. Once you acquire your first few Retweeters, the next step is to hang onto them. Like regular customers at a restaurant, Retweeters will return time and time again—as long as they are treated well. Every time someone Retweets a link to one of your articles, is it critical that you both acknowledge their effort and return the favor by:
@Replying them a “Thank You.”
Adding them to a special Retweeter Twitter List.
Retweeting something of theirs.
Giving them at least one #FollowFriday recommendation.
In an effort to lead by example, this past week I sent over 80 Thank You messages and recommended nearly 150 people with a #FollowFriday mention. Sure, 95% of Twitter users don’t bother doing ANY of these things, but we are article marketers. And the world expects more from us.
It is also important to note that some (but not all) of this process can be automated. Although I used to complete Step #2 manually, today I use a tool called SocialOomph (now offering a Free 6-Day Trial). SocialOomph not only handles much of this for me, but manages to find me nearly 50 targeted followers per day. To date, it’s the most valuable $29 per month I spend on article Marketing. I am also quickly becoming a fan of a new social marketing automation tool called Buzzom Premium, which offers the same features as SocialOomph—plus a ridiculous amount of social analytics—for just 10 bucks per month. To me, you can’t go wrong using either or both tools.
Step #3: Ask Your List Members to Help Distribute New Articles. Effective article marketing involves elements of both “giving” and “receiving.” Here in Step 3 the receiving finally begins, and all of your hard work will begin to pay off . . . if you have been following the rules. Remember that Retweeter List I asked you to start building is Step 2? If you send each of these people a quick Direct Message on days when you release something new, odds are they will be more than willing to Retweet it to their followers. Be sure to ask nicely, and provide a shortened version of the URL using a service like TinyURL or bit.ly (otherwise tools like SocialOomph and Buzzom will automatically do this for you).
Also note that Retweets often generate more Retweets, so be sure to use a good dashboard tool to filter and monitor @mentions and DMs. People who Retweet a Retweet (does your head hurt yet?) are just as valuable as the members of your List, and should be shown the same courtesy outlined in Step #2—a Thank You, a List, an RT, and a #FollowFriday mention.
If you want to build a community around your content, there is going to be some work involved in developing an active and loyal follower base. But a system like this can get you going in no time. I know this not because I’m guessing, but because this is exactly what I do every single week.
Comments? Questions? Feel free to reply to this post. Otherwise a Retweet, Facebook Share, LinkedIn Share or other type of social share (handy buttons provided) would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Related Articles You Might Enjoy:
5 Free Twitter Tools for the Busy Small Company Marketer
An Interview with Buzzom CEO Bhupendra Khanal (Part 2)
Social Marketing Automation: Interview with the CEO of Buzzom
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Author: Eric_Rudolf (78 Articles)
Eric Rudolf is the Executive Director of one of the fastest-growing professional development and training companies in the world, as well as a featured small business writer for LegalZoom.com and RainToday.com—a major marketing and sales portal operated by the Wellesley Hills Group. Eric can be followed on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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