A Twitter account with thousands of followers might give an impression that this account is of high social influence. Well, that is not totally true. In fact, there is a percentage of fake followers. This percentage could be high sometimes. What are fake followers? Why they’re following you? How to remove fake followers?
Fake followers…
A Twitter account with the following combinations could be considered fake one: Following far exceeding the followed, Small number of tweets, and Long time since last posting. Furthermore, a fake account could have strange profile image and/or confusing details.
But why do I care?
To tell the truth, I don’t think it’s a big deal for a normal person like me. Many are willing to pay to increase the number of their followers. However, effects can be summarized in:
- Less interaction: Fake followers might not interact with your tweets.
- Reputation. Relatively, one’s might wake up in the morning to find thousands of their followers disappeared. Twitter blocks those fake accounts periodically.
- Buying fake followers could cause your account to be suspended.
What should I do?
If you care about the above points, the best way is to download your followers list with their details. With some analysis, you can identity fake ones. Unfortunately, you need an app to extract such data. Most of the web applications aren’t free! The best ones I found are “Followerwonk” and “Simplymeasured”.
Here is my personal experience…
I started with twitteraudit.com to identify the fake followers’ percentage for my account. Based on the result, I decided on buying one-month subscription from Followerwonk to download the followers report(s). BE CAREFUL, the “twitteraduit” service is free for the first time only. But re-auditing isn’t! You need also to pay if you want to hide the results. After I found a high percentage of fake followers, I studied the reports and removed hundreds of followers that I believe they are fake. Then I paid again to re-audit my account!
How to remove a Twitter follower?
If you want to remove unwanted followers, blocking is the way. Some old articles mentioned that blocking an account and then un-blocking it again will remove it from your Twitter followers. Fortunately, it’s still a valid way! It could be time consuming though if the number of accounts to be removed is large. I found some online services that do this job for reasonable price.
In general …
Twitter fake followers might not be really a bad thing. However, it’s better to stay away from them if you can. Checking your settings occasionally is a good practice to revoke authorized access for unwanted services and not used apps.
Great article, really appreciate it – I have just one question: If you happen to have a lot of fake followers you wanna ban, do you have to do it all manually or is there some workaround? Thanks, and have a good one!
Thank you. I came through some online services that do auto-banning with normal mode or strict mode. Some other services offered that banning is based on a list you provide for the users to be banned. For me, the first choice was scary: Allowing a software to decide on fake users. In my case, I did it manually over few days; time consuming but safe.
“blocking an account and then un-blocking it again will remove it from your Twitter followers”. They will be able to follow you again. Right?
Just don’t unblock them
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