The fake twitter follower experiment: What happened when we bought 30,000 fake Twitter followers?

The fake twitter follower experiment: What happened when we bought 30,000 fake Twitter followers?

Over the past month, the practice of buying twitter followers to artificially make you look like a super-influencer has come under the microscope in the blogosphere and tech press.

Most of that coverage revolved around the practice of buying followers itself and how it's not a good thing.  We agree, its not.

However, we wanted to see the process through ourselves.

What actually happens when you buy thousands of followers in one go?  And can you definitely prove that buying fake followers has no business value?

Hence an experiment that we carried out at Rabbit, which involved three of us (@dirktherabbit, @brideyrae and @catturner) buying 10,000 followers each and sending them to three test twitter accounts (@dirkthebunny, @brideyrare and @cattherabbit).  

Here's what happened:

1 - The process: Buying popularity is cheap and easy

We went into Google and searched for 'buy twitter followers.'.

We chose three different providers at three different prices - $20, $40, $60 - and put our order in.

Two immediate observations: 30,000 followers cost us less than £100 - fake popularity is pretty cheap.

Secondly, you can buy followers for anyone, you don't need to be logged into your account.  @brideyrae coined a term for what that could lead to - fan bombing - sending thousands of fake followers to someone else's account for good or for bad.

Indeed, this is what recently happened to former conservative MP Louise Mensch, when someone sent her 20,000 twitter followers over the course of a day.

All three of our orders were delivered within 72 hours, with the most expensive supplier of the three coming in last.

We could then take a look at who our new followers were:

Our experience is that a fake follower is not an 'egg' (an empty profile with the standard oval shape in place of a profile image).

Instead, the minimum has been done to make those accounts look as if there are real people behind them.

Typically they follow 20-200 people (so nothing too outlandish), have a biog that seems plausible so long as you don't spend more than a few seconds looking, they have a profile picture and have sent 3-5 fake tweets.

As these accounts exist purely to follow you, you can quite easily see who else is in this particular game, by looking at your follower's followers.

Typically we noticed a lot of 'social media gurus', supposed motivational speakers, self-styled business leaders, and people selling novelty products.  We also spotted one person who claimed to be a Huffington Post writer.

Interestingly, we saw that a number of small to medium sized figures in the entertainment and music industries are in the market for follower total enhancement, as seen from when we put some of their biogs through wordle (below):

From observation the practice of buying twitter followers also seemed to be particularly prevalent in the Middle East, a topic that’s been covered recently in the Arabic media.

2 - The profile of a fake follower.

Provided you only look for a few seconds, they look real

3 - Who buys fake followers -

Some in the music industry do

In fact, the biogs of the fake accounts look as if they have been taken from real ones.

4 - None of these “followers” will pay any attention to you

They will not interact with you, your content or your brand in any shape or form.  They won't retweet you, they won't visit a URL you point them towards, they most certainly won't buy anything you make.

Here is what we did to prove that:

• At Rabbit we produce a daily social media newsletter called the Rabbitgram, we had our test accounts send out both a bit.ly link to various daily issues, as well as a link inviting people to subscribe via email The result?  Nothing

•We asked @dirkthebunny’s 10,108 followers to tweet him in exchange for a $10 amazon voucher.  Other than getting spam, there were no takers

5 - You won’t see a sudden spike in your Klout score

By and large the inflated follower totals didn't make much difference to our Klout scores, for example, @dirkthebunny’s went up from 10 to 14, hardly enough to get any perks

Peerindex did show up one glitch in that the @cattherabbit test account was awarded a reasonably respectable score of 32 even before the 10,000 followers arrived (by the end of the week the peer index score was 36)

6 - So does size matter?  To some people it does

So the only reason to do this is to give the perception of being popular online.  

Who would do such a thing?  By and large people whose whole raison d'être is about being popular. People in the entertainment business struggling to break through, one-person band businesses selling the latest thing, a few self-appointed social media experts wanting to wow their clients with the 200k people who follow them. And yes, though the snake oil salesman end of the market is getting smaller, it does still exist.

In fact, it looked to us as if a lot of people in the business of buying fake followers top up on a regular basis, like some junkie going to their dealer for a fix.

The follower brokers on their part seem to have a business model that encourages this behaviour. Within a week, both @cattherabbit and @dirkthebunny had lost 500+ followers, our guess is that they had been redeployed by their handlers to serve other customers (remember fake accounts follow only a few hundred maximum).

The fact is size does still matter. We can talk about engagement versus numbers all we want, but just the other month a senior UK marketer stated that if you don’t have a million followers, social media campaigns are a waste of money.

People who buy fake followers do so because they think it works. They will go to a potential client, customer or business partner, using the several hundred thousand followers as a calling card. And in most cases that following will be taken at face value.

Until we do more to break down the fallacy of the big number, this is a practice that will continue.

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We're keeping these accounts running as we want to run a few more experiments over the coming months.  Watch this space!

Any comments, find us at http://www.therabbitagency.com, follow us on Twitter @therabbitagency or email us hello AT therabbitagency.com

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