There are some Victims…

It is an important point that not everyone who has a large number of fake followers has paid for them. Ryan Tracey commented on a post I wrote last year called “Do you know the Twitter Limits” to say that he was the victim of 24,000 fake accounts following him. To read more on the subject you can read his blog post about him “being bot-bombed“. Unfortunately, there isn’t a huge amount you can do about this apart from blocking or reporting each account individually or using a 3rd party tool such as Buy Instagram Followers. TwitBlock analyses your account for spam, zombie or bot accounts and lets you block or report them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t let you do this in bulk, but this is rather unsurprising since I am pretty sure it goes against Twitter’s terms and conditions. There are tools that allow you to bulk unfollow, such as Manage Flitter*, but none that I know of that allow you to bulk block. If you know of any, please let me know in the comments.

How about Facebook?

Although I have mentioned Facebook, I have mainly been referring to Twitter throughout this post. The issue of fake followers is still an issue on Facebook, it is just a little more difficult to analyze. To be fair, Facebook came clean recently and claimed that over 83 million Facebook accounts are fake which confirmed what a lot of people were already thinking. At the end of August on the Facebook Security blog, Facebook announced they were going to remove fake likes from pages.

Measure Engagement Not Follower Count

So what is the moral of this story? Well apart from it not being moral to buy your followers and having the possibility of having your account suspended or deleted, the number of followers you have really isn’t that important. Let’s make an effort not to play the numbers game and be impressed with the number of followers or likes some business has. Work on building a community of people who are interested in you or your product/service. You will most certainly reap the benefits if you do. There are lots of ways to help you do this, including tools such as Commun.it*.

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How to Grow your Followers the Right Way

I’ve explained why buying followers is bad (unless you are paying for Facebook or Twitter advertising to boost your followers), so how can you grow your followers the right way?

By providing value to people, that’s how! And… by finding relevant people to follow or are likely to follow you back and engage with you.

There are a number of tools that are going to help us in this quest.

ManageFlitter* (Free or from $12/mth)

ManageFlitter allows you to manage your Twitter followers and community in a very powerful way. They have a free version, but if you are going to get the most out of this tool, you’ll have to pay. It’s very reasonably priced (from $12 per month) and it’s going to help you grow your Twitter followers very effectively. I use their power mode to find relevant people to follow- ones that are likely to engage with me and hopefully follow me back. Remember, as well as growing your followers, wouldn’t it also be good to build strong relationships with relevant people, or get more leads?

With the power mode, I can follow the Twitter accounts that an influential and relevant person in my niche follows. I can then filter this list to only include accounts…

• that I’m not following
• who don’t currently follow me
• who are active (i.e. they’ve Tweeted at least once in the past 30 days)
• who have bothered to create a profile picture on their Twitter profile
• who don’t have a protected (i.e. private) account
• who are not in my “never unfollow” or “never follow” lists
• who I’ve never followed before
• who are unlikely to be spam accounts
• who have over a certain number of followers themselves
• and more!

You can then go through and quickly follow Twitter accounts that look promising. In many cases, they’ll follow you back.

Every so often, I’d advise doing another search using ManageFlitter to see who hasn’t followed you back in the past 30 days. Don’t just unfollow them all though! Go through and add accounts that really add value to your “never unfollow” account so you never unfollow them, but do unfollow accounts who have never bothered to engage with you or follow you back- if it makes sense to do so.

For more information, visit ManageFlitter.

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Agora Pulse* (from $29/mth, free trial available)

Agora Pulse is a powerful social media management tool that helps with posting and scheduling your content, reporting and segmenting your audience to show you the most important people- the ones who support and engage with you the most. Agora Pulse integrates with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The reason I am recommending it here is that it will help you be much more productive and effective with your social engagements. Agora Pulse is kind of like a social inbox. You can quickly and easily go through all your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram mentions and comments and get down to inbox zero. If you want to grow your audience, then engagement is key. Don’t be a social media guru and be a one-way communication machine!

As well as helping with engagement, Agora Pulse can show you the top people in your community-

• Engaged (people who have mentioned and commented in the past 30 days)
• Ambassador (people who have retweeted or linked to your website in the past 30 days)
• Influencer (someone who is retweeted more than 20 times in the past 30 days)

Building relationships with these people will expand your reach and help to grow your followers.

For more information, visit the Agora Pulse.

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More Tools to Help with Growing your Community.

For more tools and tips on how to grow your followers, come back soon. I’m adding new tools frequently. In particular, I’d recommend:

• Commun.it* – A social relationship manager, Commun.it shows you who are you supports and influencers and suggests accounts you should follow. Integrates with Twitter and Facebook.
• Feedly – A news feed reader that integrates with a plethora of social networks. Great for discovering high-quality content that you can share with your followers.
• Buffer – A posting and scheduling tool that integrates with a huge number of social networks.
• IFTTT – Connects multiple tools and services together.