There are a bunch of people on Twitter who have thousands of fake followers. Some of them have a few thousand followers, others have tens of thousands of followers, and there are the select few who have hundreds of thousands of followers. However, not all of those people have a lot of real followers.
In order to identify who has real followers and who bought fake followers, you can use TwitterAudit. TwitterAudit is a Twitter tool that allows you to see the percentage of real and fake followers someone has. If the percentage of fake followers is alarmingly high, that person most likely bought some fake followers. If the percentage of fake followers is low, that person probably did not buy fake followers.
Influential users on Twitter happen to have thousands of followers. Some people cheat the system by buying fake followers and making themselves look really good. TwitterAudit will allow you to see who has the real followers and who doesn’t.
TwitterAudit isn’t just a tool for our pleasure (if you are curious about who’s buying followers and who’s earning them). TwitterAudit can reveal new things about brands and influencers that can help your Twitter strategy.
#1: Real Influence VS Fake Influence
One account with over 100,000 Twitter followers tweeted one of my tweets. The tweet was retweeted and liked dozens of time. Naturally, I should see a noticeable increase in traffic.
The main word there is “naturally.” These followers weren’t real. This knowledge allowed me understand why the tweet didn’t result in additional traction to my blog. It wasn’t because my blog post was bad. The account neither had real followers nor real engagement.
#2: Who To Follow
I want to follow successful people in my niche. That way, I get to expand my knowledge in the right areas. Seeing someone with fake followers makes me question their success. You only need fake followers if you want to make yourself look more successful than you really are.
#3: Audience Growth
Follow for follow only works to a certain degree. If you follow fake accounts, they probably won’t follow you back. Even if they follow you back (fake accounts are trying harder to look like real ones), those are followers who you don’t want.
Don’t even think about those Follow 4 Follow accounts. You’ll get an extra follower, but that follower won’t care about what you tweet. These followers just want to make themselves look good by having a lot of real (but non-targeted) followers.
Here’s where TwitterAudit fits into the equation. Find influencers and brands in your niche with real, engaged followers. These followers are targeted followers since they are following brands in your niche and engaging with their tweets.
You follow these accounts and then they’ll follow you back.
I always use TwitterAudit to test the validity of an account before I start following that account’s followers. Any account in the 80% real followers threshold is fine with me.
In Conclusion
TwitterAudit isn’t just a cool tool you can use to catch the fakers and figure out who hasn’t been bluffing. You can integrate TwitterAudit in your strategy by determining who are the real influencers and where your targeted audience resides.
TwitterAudit won’t take much time in your Twitter strategy. It may just take 5-10 minutes of your time each month. However, if you are serious about growing on Twitter, these 5-10 minutes can easily save you from months of heartache.
What are your thoughts about TwitterAudit? Sound off in the comments section below.
Good timing on seeing this post, I actually just wrote an article regarding fake Twitter followers myself. I didnt know the Twitter Audit tool existed, but I’ll have to start using it in the future!
Twitter Audit is a great tool. I wouldn’t recommend getting stuck in it and searching for whoever you feel searching for, but it’s great for learning about your Twitter audience and other people’s audiences in your niche.
Am going to give TwitterAudit a try!
I love how you did the review here
I’m happy to hear you’re going to give TwitterAudit a try. You’ll get a better idea of how many of your followers and other people in your niche are real.
Thanks for the article Marc greatly appreciated. Explains a lot about why my natural reach hasn’t gotten as expanded as it should. Does Twitter Audit cost anything?
TwitterAudit is free but it costs $4 if you’d like to get an updated version of the stats (i.e. according to their stats, I have 83% real followers, but that % has stuck with me ever since I used them. An update would reveal a different statistic, probably more in my favor).
thanks for the link! 29 out of 9700. 99% real deal. #FoundMyTribe
I’m happy to hear you’ve found your tribe Michael 🙂
Thanks Marc. this is a very good tool. I like reading your blogs and you surely share a lot of useful materials.
My pleasure.
Hello Marc,
As always, thank you for providing great information. I have had followers follow me then 4 days later unfollow. What’s the use of that? I follow in hopes of building a relationship and community. I’m not up for the follow/ unfollow game that some people play. Annoying!
I agree that the follow/unfollow game is an annoying one. Sometimes I’ll unfollow people who don’t follow me back because a relationship was not established. It’s annoying that people go to sites to follow people in exchange for a few more followers, but understandable. These sites work at boosting your number, and I used sites like these for a while before I learned about growing a targeted audience (I stopped using those types of sites at around 1,600 followers). Your method of following people has the right intention.
Hey Marc
In one of your earlier posts you recommended using Twiends for the first 1000 followers. I used that once and my following started growing hope I have not added fake followers. Should I use twiends ?
Twiends is a great tool for getting followers. In my experience, most of the followers are legit. Getting the initial followers in the beginning makes it possible for you to follow more people since the 2K limit would no longer apply once you reach 2,000 followers.
Hey marc, you post great content on twitter. I had a 98% score, the fakers app told me I had 0 fake followers! Good to know. Keep up the good work
Thank you Joris. Nice job with your score!
I have 94% score .23 are fake. how to find them and unfollow??
The Fakers App’s basic plan is one method to identify who your fake followers are so you can unfollow them. I personally wouldn’t worry about it. TwitterAudit is a random sampling of 5,000 Twitter followers that you have. They rank based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and follow ratio. TwitterAudit shows me with 30,000 fake followers while the Fakers App only says 1% of my followers are fake (a little under 2,000). I don’t buy fake followers in any way (that would completely contradict my own advice), but somehow they end up following my account. TwitterAudit is a great tool to give you a general idea with where you and others are at.
My score is 97%. Thanks a lot for sharing this amazing tool. I never understand why people are behind fake followers. This is just for their own satisfaction because unethical following is never going to make profit or benefit in any way.
My pleasure. Many people buy fake followers to increase their social proof, but this is negative social proof, especially when they get caught. I could have 1 million followers right now if I felt like paying a few thousand dollars, but it’s bad social proof and would hurt my overall authority. The relationships you build with your followers are more important than the number of followers you have.
Nice tool. Thanks for sharing. Says I have 2% fake-I know that some they say are fakes though are not-they are just people that used Twitter for a bit but never really kept up with it.
Thanks again.
My pleasure Dawn. I am happy to hear that you like the tool. Some of the accounts TwitterAudit says are fake may be real people who are never on Twitter. TwitterAudit identifies users who have been inactive for a long period of time as fake users.
When I heard some time back about the jealousy Lady Gaga had over Justin Beiber having more followers than her (and more Youtube views), I thought there was something fake about it. I looked into it and what did I find? My suspicions confirming to be true! There is no prize for having the most followers. Why do they want that so badly? I’m Auditing everyone!
I do not know why they want followers that badly. Most of the people with over 1 million followers also have a bunch of fake followers. It is extremely rare for someone to have 1 million followers and not a giant amount of fake followers as well. It is a shame that it happens, but to the people who do not know about fake followers as much, fake numbers look like incredible social proof.
Thanks for the Twitter Tip, Marc 🙂 I audited myself and came back with 98% real Followers. I look at each new Follower and block those who are just selling Followers or obviously spammy so I’m surprised it wasn’t 100%. Oh well, no one’s perfect, ha!
I am happy to hear that you have 98% real followers Erika. No matter how hard anyone tries, no one will be perfect, but to be honest, the algorithm is not perfect either. Some of the fake followers are inactive users, but TwitterAudit is a great indicator of where you stand with your account. It’s also a cool way to see who on Twitter buys followers. I was surprised to learn that most of the celebrities actually buy Twitter followers (as if a few million real followers aren’t good enough).
Oh what people will do for the appearance of influence and leadership. This should speak to how much influence is really worth!
Influence is definitely something powerful to have, but when someone gets caught with artificial influence, a big chunk of the real influence gets taken away.
So I’ve got 40 fake followers out of 679. I wonder who they are. I hope Grumpy Cat is not one of them. I was so proud when I got the follow from her. I followed her back of course.
Grumpy cat is not a fake follower, but some fake people will follow you for no apparent reason. It happens to everyone.
Good article. I’ve had plenty of people trying to get me to buy followers. Where is the fun in that? I know I will feel more successful when I actually work hard to build up real followers. I also heard that companies like google pick up on that and look less favorably upon you. Not sure if thats true though.
It’s a shame to see some companies have to resort to that. However, that does not mean I am going to abandon that company. I use Google every day and just because they have over 2 million fake/inactive followers does not mean I will avoid Google. I just look at them a little differently. What I really get confused about is why big companies like Google would bother buying real followers. They already have millions of real followers anyway.
Some people first follow you and when you following them back then they unfollowing you, so they will have a lots of followers… this is a kind of cheating too….
I agree. This strategy does not allow a person to build quality connections with their followers. This strategy ends up hurting the person who practices it.