Twitter influential members – Are your follower’s real people or a hoax?

The online marketing environment is changing at a rate of knots, with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and numerous other sites vying for your attention. But as quickly as new sites and applications are developed, spammers and other hoaxers are finding ways to take advantage of the hard work you put in building influence.

Twitter is currently the buzzword when it comes to social media. In case you aren’t yet across it, here’s the low down: the beauty of Twitter is its simplicity – you write ‘tweets’ of 147 characters or less (a sentence or two at most) and your followers can read your messages either online or by mobile phone. Celebrities, corporations, charities, and just about everyone else is hooked.

And of course, so are the spammers. So if you have just started tweeting and you’re amazed by the huge number of followers you’re attracting – perhaps even a little smug at how darn good at this you are – you might need to look into the validity of your followers. The reality is probably that you’re not building influence quite so quickly.

Real people or a Hoax?

One of the practices widely used for building influence on Twitter is the use of third party software to systematically add a large number of social connections each day. Such a practice allows people to grow their list of followers quickly and automatically without any close monitoring. The question that comes to my mind is, when you are building these lists automatically and when you can build them that fast, are you monitoring whether you are adding real people or just hoaxes?

Follower farms – What are they?

Follower farms are generated lists of followers that have a scrambled nonsense name, no real user first or last name, no web link and not even a description or a single contribution. It is not hard to spot follower farms because when they attach themselves to your profile they come in group of tens and hundreds at a time which will inflate the number of your followers immediately.

The immediate results of being attacked by these spamming farms are your number of followers grows fast. At first, this could seem like a good thing – the more followers the better, right? Surely when people come across your profile and see your thousands of followers they’ll figure you must be worth following?

Actually, it’s worth giving this a bit more thought. Ask yourself:

• Why would you want thousands of followers who are not human?
• What will happen to your reputation and influence when your number of followers drop by thousands as a result of these farms being suspended (this is something that has happened to a LOT of people recently as Twitter went through and deleted a large number of spam accounts)?
• Are scammers in social media using these farms to trick people and steal their money after selling them an influential account while in reality it is all a hoax?
• And are they actually undermining the credibility of your influence rather building influence, when people check to see who’s following you and turns out to be a bunch of automatically generated nobodies?

What should YOU do to Avoid Follower Farms?

1. Keep a close eye to your follower account, even if you use third party software. Only a human eye can detect these farms and only you can prevent your software for following these scammers.
2. Always scan the list of your followers even randomly. Believe me, it is not hard to spot these farms and block them.
3. Do not engage a social media company that is not known and promises big influential accounts for extremely low prices, because a good, robust, influential account requires time and human content to be built.

A quality Social Media Company like Solution416 takes more than few months to build you a quality Twitter profile with real content and real followers, and you should not accept anything less.