Fake Twitter Accounts More Common Than You Think [Infographic]

I sometimes wonder if when big social networking giants like Facebook and Twitter announce their total number of users if they subtract all the ones that could potentially be fake accounts. Are you surprised there are fake Twitter accounts? You might wonder what those could possibly be all about. I know a lot of people who think social media is all about connecting and being social, but there are people out there whose only reason for being on social networks is to setup as many accounts as they possibly can. They use them to sell their “influence” to other people. For a lack of a better explanation, they are basically selling followers. There are a lot of people who think if they have a lot of followers, they will automatically spawn a lot of real people to start following them as well.

Well, that is never the case. People follow people because they find what they are sharing, whether it is links or daily activities, interesting. If you appeal to people, they will start following you. It’s really as simple as that. However, that doesn’t keep people from wanting a little bit more “oomph” behind their account. If it looks good, and if it sounds good, it must be good, right? Nah, that’s not really so in this particular case. Fake Twitter accounts have gone through the roof, and that is probably one of the major reasons why Twitter wanted to lower the hourly API request limit.

A new infographic from Social Selling University sets out to explain to us the secret behind all of the fake Twitter accounts. It’s a revelation that could potentially explain why the response to your interaction or sharing sometimes seems a little low compared to the amount of followers you are supposedly reaching. It could also have a profound effect on your view of how social networking works. Reach is a big factor in social media, and for a brand it’s everything. However, reach has become such a broken measurement lately, and one reason for that is because of all the fake Twitter accounts out there.

With the help of NowSourcing‘s design skills, this infographic sheds some important light on how much of your following is really real and what percentage of it could be called dead weight. It’s not just the scammers who buy followers. Politicians and quite a lot of the people who we are following are also buying followers. I am not saying all of them are of course, but there are so many fake accounts out there that some will overflow to people who want nothing to do with buying followers at all. After all, these Twitter fake accounts need some weight behind them in order to look real, so they will follow anyone who is willing to follow them back, if that makes sense.

Have a look at this infographic called The Appearance Of Social Media and let yourself in on the secret about why there are so many followers who don’t communicate or interact. It’s more and more common that you will try to interact with a fake Twitter account rather than a real one. Is it annoying? Possibly so, but there are still way more real people to interact with than there are fake Twitter people. What should we do about it? I guess there is little we can do, and even though Twitter started lowering their limits, which will hurt a lot of legit businesses out there, I personally see no resolve to the problem.