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Fake Followers? Exposé On Devumi Spurs Backlash On Social Media's Black Market http://ift.tt/2Gq1UUV This morning a colleague forwarded a link to the New York Times article The Follower Factory—an exposé on an obscure American company called Devumi that sells Twitter followers and bots that automatically retweet to celebrities, executives, social media “influencers” anyone who will pay. My reaction: “Wow.” Back in the day, (approximately 2012) the mystical number of 10,000 followers was the bar social media savvy executives aspired to. A well-known Utah CEO even joked about the phenomenon in a speech. In his brief sojourn after a highly-publicized exit, he noticed his contemporaries had 10,000 followers apiece, compared to his own 5,000. “Then I realized they’d bought them,” he said. So he purchased 5,000 more of his own, to stay even. But then he noticed that when he posted about issues that mattered to him in notes such as “Read this article--insightful” that within 30 minutes or so, at least 500 people had read. Allowing for the fact that 50% of his followers were fake, he had still managed to move 10% of his 5,000 legitimate followers to action in less than an hour. This was good, and described the growing power of social media influence, even in cases where the number of followers had been fudged. But fast forward to 2018 and the floodgates have opened. Twitter’s records show 330 million active users posting 500 million tweets every day. The leaders this executive scoped in 2012 now have followings of 45-50,000 apiece. But for celebrities and professional influencers the sums are outrageous. @RealDonaldTrump has 47.5M followers. @KimKardashianWest has 58.5M. Are those followers real? For Devumi’s 200,000 customers (including TED speakers, professional athletes, actors and executives) the majority are not, the New York Times article reports. Many are not even the product of Devumi, but the result of outsourced “bots” that have altered and impersonated the identities of legitimate users to post about products ranging from sundries to porn. The company’s Manhattan address is a fraud. The founder’s LinkedIn resume is largely fabricated as well, claiming advanced degrees from M.I.T. and Princeton that both universities have denied. The fake followers phenomenon applies to Facebook as well. In November, the Times reports, Facebook disclosed to investors that as many as 60 million accounts—twice as many as previously estimated—are automated bot-generated accounts. What does this mean for individual and company social media campaigns? Thankfully, according to sources I’ve queried, the priorities are changing. Business via Forbes - Entrepreneurs http://ift.tt/dTEDZf January 28, 2018 at 09:48PM
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