This week’s Feedback Friday, Social Media Roundup takes a look at the social media black market – an industry that buys and sells fake fans and followers – and the recent attempts by three social media sites to fight back!
The practice of buying and selling social media fans and followers, in addition to the other illicit trends discussed, is the latest extension of “black hat” tactics that have long been used in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. These include keyword stuffing, hidden text, redirects, duplicate sites, paid links on irrelevant sites to inflate popularity, and many, many more. While “black hat” tactics may initially trigger some interest – and certainly do pick up the speed for promotion and sharing – they are wrong (some would even call them unethical) to the consumer, to advertisers who throw money away based on false information, and especially wrong to the client you represent.
Just how easy is it to buy Twitter followers? According to a new study by Barracuda Labs, the Twitter black market is running a booming operation. The firm set up three Twitter accounts and purchased between 20-70 thousand followers per account from eBay as well as a website that ranked highly in a search for “buy Twitter followers”. They then collected data from those thousands of user profiles. The findings:
Dealers: One can make a pretty penny buying and selling fake followers, as much as $5,600 a week (if they control roughly 20,000 fake accounts), according to the study. Dealers also profit from selling re-tweets, at roughly $5 for 2,000 re-tweets. (Remember this number because Twitter caps followers at 2,000 until their follow-to-follower ratio balances out, or the account may risk suspension.)
Abusers: Roughly 11,283 Abusers (those users who buy followers) were identified, each with an average following of 48,885 followers. So, quality over quantity prevails after all!
Fake Accounts(created by dealers for selling followers or re-tweeting businesses): There were 72,212 unique fake accounts identified, 61% of which are less than 3 months old.
Considering that there were more than 11,000 Abusers identified from a study that used only three test accounts, these numbers are alarming. Even more shocking, the study suggests that one Abuser may be Mitt Romney, whose Twitter followers drastically increased by 17% over the course of a single day, indicating that someone on his staff (or an opponent) purchased bulk Twitter followers. The rise in followers coincides with a widely shared report – and infographic – that criticized the Republican candidate for not using social media. Seems there’s a lot of discrepancy in his campaign, but we’ll leave that for another blog post…
Click here to read more on the sneaky tactics Dealers and Abusers use to avoid getting caught and suspended by Twitter.
Facebook is reportedly taking active measures to reduce the number of fake and duplicate profiles that populate the site. In an SEC filing in early August the company revealed that approximately 8.7 percent of its 950 million monthly active user accounts are duplicates, spammers or not actually human beings. That’s roughly 83 million phony accounts! Approximately 4.8 percent of Facebook’s monthly active user-base is made up of duplicate accounts (not good news to tell those already angry stockholders). Another 2.4 percent consist of misclassified accounts — profiles for companies or pets that have yet to be converted into Facebook Pages. And there is an additional 1.5 percent of “undesirable” accounts – managed by spammers.
One area that Facebook is targeting are profiles that contain the word “cosplay”- a term that refers to gaming, role-playing, manga, LARPing, and other not-based-in-the-real-world characters (the term is a portmanteau of “costume” and “play”). Facebook deleted user accounts containing “cosplay”, considering it a terms of service violation. (These hobbyists are free to create fan pages for this purpose).
Pinterest, which has more than 20 million registered users, is in a catch 22; The site offers a completely new way for businesses to promote their brand, products and services – and drive traffic to their site. This has inevitably led to the proliferation of over-pinning and spamming. In fact, our first foray into a shared Pinterest board proved just how pushy spammers and other online marketers can be.
Pinterest is now disabling certain types of links to get control.
Affiliate links: Amazon used to offer Pinners a cut of the profit if they pinned products that contained a link back to Amazon. This is no longer the case – Pinterest has been marking all affiliate program links as spam, and blocking them. Score one for the good guys!
Shortened links: Shortened links are an asset to online marketing, especially Twitter and SMS. Likewise, they are an asset to spammers and those who enage in illicit Internet activities. Pinterest users that click on a shortened URL will now see a roadblock icon. While there are dozens of link shortening services (Bit.ly and TinyUrl are probably the most popular), a study in May 2012 showed that 61% of URL shorteners had shut down, cited for abuse/spamming.
Links With Information Added at the End: Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Pinterest does not permit link tracking, and thus removes all information/data attached to the end of a pinned URL. Pinterest found that tags were being exploited by spammers. Pinterest’s efforts are likely to be less permanent than Facebook and Twitter, as the company works to support businesses and online marketers, just without the threat of spam.
Fascinating article. It’s time social media groups began taking action regarding ‘fake’ likes, etc. Social media marketing generally works best when you develop relationships with connections. While buying them gives an immediate connection boost, from a realistic standpoint it’s highly unlikely those individuals will take an interest in what you have to say, your products, services or brand.
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