• Email
  • Email

Is it ethical to buy followers and likes to boost business or name?

You can now purchase twitter followers, Facebook likes and Youtube views rather than waiting for ages to gather them naturally. Never be surprised when you happen to pass-by such an ad placed, as this is already into practice. Brands and celebrities hunt for fake social count providers for commercialization purpose.
 

Search for 'buy twitters followers' in whatever search engine you use, and it turns up results from sites such as USocial.net, InterTwitter.com, and FanMeNow.com. An unemployed former accountant operating from a house in Warrington, Cheshire has set up a site named 'buyfollowerstwitter.co.uk' two months back showing guaranteed results in just three to four days. Other such sites are - Blumpo, uSocial and Social Promotionz.

Fake Twitter Followers

This recent issue of politicians and celebrities who exploited 'Twitter followers' just for the purpose of self-promotion made headlines when Mitt Romney’s Twitter following jumped by more than 100,000 in one weekend, a growth rate with no feasible explanation.  Lady Gaga, Barack Obama, Rihana, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, Ellen DeGenerres, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, Oprah Winfrey, Katy Perry, and Shakira, are few among others, who got stripped down. 


Tool to sort fake

StatusPeople introduced a new application, capable of detecting the number of fake followers that a particular Twitter account has. This tool can analyze 100,000 most recent followers of a particular account, and could give you the accurate count of fake or inactive accounts which are among the huge fan-list of celebrities. 'Fake' means those accounts which are setup just for the purpose of following people or send out spam, which have no followers for themselves but are active followers of too many of the others. 'Inactive' means that account which lacks activity for quite a while. A good account refers to one with followers and being followed with regular tweets and conversations.
 
Every twitter account will have some fake followers for sure. If the fakers are below 20 percent then you are on the safer side. This tool is for sure to warn people from buying fake followers, though it will not be able to put a full stop to this problem.

When Business Insider experimented this tool with a list of 20 top ten brands in hand , the results as they claim were shocking. The results are compiled as follows:

StatusPeople point fake twitter followers

Consequences:
 
Have a look at an ad placed by a fake follower’s provider - "I will deliver 1,200 retweets plus 1,200 favorites and promote it to 430,000 followers within 12 hours for $5." If this practice continues and social networks when they reach a state of exhaustion cleaning their interface, it ends in a state where people will no longer rely on numbers (even if they are for real). If one third of the numbers ends up as fake, that will be the only go, since people will get confused to conclude. 
 
The main reason behind companies getting fake followers is to boost their ad revenue, since ads are placed on the basis of the number of followers they have. 75 percent of those who have purchase fake followers have their web address in their profile page of Twitter. Brian Blau, Analyst at Gartner says, "I think what they're intending to do is get a handle on it before it gets really out of control." It’s worth noting that marketing people place advertisements in your fake account page. If this continues, it is for sure to emerge as an irreversible sin over social media and its reliability. 

What is socialmedia's stand?

CNET reportedthat about 4.8 percent of the Facebook accounts were duplicates, while 2.4percent were user-misclassified accounts, and 1.5 percent was undesirable ones.Lately after these allegations, Facebook announced that "less than 1% oflikes on any given Page will be removed" and the new system "will nothave any sizeable impact on any Page, providing they and their affiliates havebeen abiding by our terms.” Their official blog says, "Newly improvedautomated efforts will remove those Likes gained by malware, compromised accounts,deceived users, or purchased bulk Likes." Facebook has started takingefforts to crack down on all fake activities that persist in its medium. Thecourage to act upon criticism is one best thing to be appreciated.

There are anumber of service providers who sell fake twitter followers for the sociallydeficient. What makes it unfortunate is that the only way to get rid of thesefake twitter accounts is to individually block them or report them for spam.After that, "Protect my Tweets" option is to be turned on and alsodeclining every other requests coming from spam accounts is important to avoidsuch faker problems in future.

Making haywhile...

social-media-blogsCleaning up asocial network which engages a huge number of people's interests and theirbusiness activities altogether is essential, since it paves way for people toland on the page they wish to as well as to get more accurate count of theirfan base and demographics.

A prestigiousissue for celebrities with Twitter accounts to have huge fan following."Who has credibility/is huge/is popular?" kind of queries raise insuch cases. Rather than building fake numbers, what PR people (associated withcelebrities and brands) should concentrate on is to have some sorts ofmeaningful and useful engagements for their clients to get news buzz. Lots ofthem prevail, and the challenge lies in identifying them right.

Category :


Tags :

social media followers, twitter fake followers, StatusPeople, celebrity fake twitter followers, bara

About Prejushya Kalicharan

Prejushya Kalicharan SEO is a challenging field and I try my best to surpass this challenging environment which is unconditionally filled with opportunities, knowledge building and problem solving. I pursue what I .... more info about the author