Fake Twitter Followers; another Multibillion Dollars Business

Posted by : Fitri Nurhayati วันเสาร์ที่ 6 เมษายน พ.ศ. 2556

A place for fake Twitter follower marketing looks as though taking a special place at folks. The fake Twitter follower phenomenon has become headline news of the last summer after Mitt Romney’s Twitter got 100,000 new followers just in a matter of days. That news encouraged some social media managing companies such as StatusPeople and Socialbakers to develop an instrument that can try to identify the percentage of someone’s fake Twitter followers.

Many sites have no boundaries to ban people of having a deal about fake Twitter follower and re-tweets in social media market, nay the market is getting smarter. In many cases, a high quality fake Twitter account is almost impossible to differ from the original one. Those who sell the fake Twitter accounts claimed if they can generate one million dollars in a week.

Andrea Stroppa and Crlo De Micheli, two notable researchers from Italy, spent the last several months finding out the underground economy for fake Twitter followers and said they had found a thriving market.

There are more than two dozen services that sell fake Twitter accounts but Mr.Stroppa and Mr.De Micheli said if they limited themselves from the most popular social network, forum and Web sites, including Fiverr, SeoClerks, InterTwitter, FanMeNow, LikedSocial, SocialPresence and Viral Media Boost. According to the number of accounts for sale on the services – and eliminating the overlapping accounts – they estimated if there are twenty million fake follower accounts now.

Fake followers are usually sold per batch of 1000-1000000 accounts. The price for a batch of 1.000 followers is $18 (based on the study of Barracuba Labs). Mr.Stroppa and Mr.De Micheli revealed if some providers claimed if they made $2 and $30 per fake account. A conservative estimation they said, is that the fake Twitter followers offered a potential business that can generate $40 million to $360 million dollars.

Fake followers are available for sale mostly because certain people want to make themselves look more authentic. “There is a software o create a fake account”, said Mr De Micheli in a interview. “It can automatically fill every detail, but in some fake accounts, you can see if they look better than the original accounts.”