Is it ethical to buy followers and likes to boost business or name?
You
can now purchase twitter followers, Facebook likes and Youtube views
rather than waiting for ages to gather them naturally. Never be
surprised when you happen to pass-by such an ad placed, as this is
already into practice. Brands and celebrities hunt for fake social count
providers for commercialization purpose.
Search
for 'buy twitters followers' in whatever search engine you use, and it
turns up results from sites such as USocial.net, InterTwitter.com, and
FanMeNow.com. An unemployed former accountant operating from a house in
Warrington, Cheshire has set up a site named 'buyfollowerstwitter.co.uk'
two months back showing guaranteed results in just three to four days.
Other such sites are - Blumpo, uSocial and Social Promotionz.
This
recent issue of politicians and celebrities who exploited 'Twitter
followers' just for the purpose of self-promotion made headlines when
Mitt Romney’s Twitter following jumped by more than 100,000 in one
weekend, a growth rate with no feasible explanation. Lady Gaga, Barack
Obama, Rihana, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, Ellen
DeGenerres, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, Oprah
Winfrey, Katy Perry, and Shakira, are few among others, who got stripped
down.
Tool to sort fake
Status People introduced
a new application, capable of detecting the number of fake followers
that a particular Twitter account has. This tool can analyze 100,000
most recent followers of a particular account, and could give you the
accurate count of fake or inactive accounts which are among the huge
fan-list of celebrities. 'Fake' means those accounts which are setup
just for the purpose of following people or send out spam, which have no
followers for themselves but are active followers of too many of the
others. 'Inactive' means that account which lacks activity for quite a
while. A good account refers to one with followers and being followed
with regular tweets and conversations.
Every
twitter account will have some fake followers for sure. If the fakers
are below 20 percent then you are on the safer side. This tool is for
sure to warn people from buying fake followers, though it will not be
able to put a full stop to this problem.
When Business Insider experimented
this tool with a list of 20 top ten brands in hand , the results as
they claim were shocking. The results are compiled as follows:
Consequences:
Have
a look at an ad placed by a fake follower’s provider - "I will deliver
1,200 retweets plus 1,200 favorites and promote it to 430,000 followers
within 12 hours for $5." If this practice continues and social networks
when they reach a state of exhaustion cleaning their interface, it ends
in a state where people will no longer rely on numbers (even if they are
for real). If one third of the numbers ends up as fake, that will be
the only go, since people will get confused to conclude.
The
main reason behind companies getting fake followers is to boost their
ad revenue, since ads are placed on the basis of the number of followers
they have. 75 percent of those who have purchase fake followers have
their web address in their profile page of Twitter. Brian Blau, Analyst
at Gartner says, "I think what they're intending to do is get a handle
on it before it gets really out of control." It’s worth noting that
marketing people place advertisements in your fake account page. If this
continues, it is for sure to emerge as an irreversible sin over social media and its reliability.
What is socialmedia's stand?
CNET
reportedthat about 4.8 percent of the Facebook accounts were
duplicates, while 2.4percent were user-misclassified accounts, and 1.5
percent was undesirable ones.Lately after these allegations, Facebook
announced that "less than 1% oflikes on any given Page will be removed"
and the new system "will nothave any sizeable impact on any Page,
providing they and their affiliates havebeen abiding by our terms.”
Their official blog says, "Newly improvedautomated efforts will remove
those Likes gained by malware, compromised accounts,deceived users, or
purchased bulk Likes." Facebook has started takingefforts to crack down
on all fake activities that persist in its medium. Thecourage to act
upon criticism is one best thing to be appreciated.
There
are anumber of service providers who sell fake twitter followers for
the sociallydeficient. What makes it unfortunate is that the only way to
get rid of thesefake twitter accounts is to individually block them or
report them for spam.After that, "Protect my Tweets" option is to be
turned on and alsodeclining every other requests coming from spam
accounts is important to avoidsuch faker problems in future.
Making haywhile...
Cleaning
up asocial network which engages a huge number of people's interests
and theirbusiness activities altogether is essential, since it paves way
for people toland on the page they wish to as well as to get more
accurate count of theirfan base and demographics.
A
prestigiousissue for celebrities with Twitter accounts to have huge fan
following."Who has credibility/is huge/is popular?" kind of queries
raise insuch cases. Rather than building fake numbers, what PR people
(associated withcelebrities and brands) should concentrate on is to have
some sorts ofmeaningful and useful engagements for their clients to get
news buzz. Lots ofthem prevail, and the challenge lies in identifying
them right.
Source: http://news.submitinme.com/newsdetails-227.aspx
