This fits in with something I came across last year. A client had been sold on promoting their site using social media by someone at a web agency they trusted. I took a look through their followers after having some suspicions about the advice of the expert about something else. As far as I could tell, three-quarters of the followers of this company were fake. They only had about 400-500 followers, so nothing like the numbers mentioned in the article, but a pretty useful amount at the time.
I wasn't sure if the client company were aware most of their followers didn't really exist. I was trying to work out how we'd broach it with them when we were dumped off our bit of the project. I couldn't work out what all the fake followers were for, I presumed at the time it was just to make it look like the social media guy was doing his job well and it was all going well, when in reality he was just buying followers in. The idea he was trying to bring in more natural followers by having a big follower count at least means he could have been acting more ethically than I thought.
Given updates in Google over the last couple of years to make social signals more and more important, it could be a lot of people buying likes, fake followers and retweets are just trying to influence the rankings of the company/page mentioned in Google's search results by showing a lot of social activity about that company.
If this is the case, the abuse will continue and probably get much worse until either Twitter cracks down on it or Google dial back on how strongly it takes signals from Twitter. Unfortunately, given how much blog spamming there still is, even after everyone started using 'nofollow' on comment links, it may not make much difference to the level of abuse. Lots of people spend time trying to manipulate Google in ways much of the SEO industry believe don't work any more.
Given this, it'll be up to Twitter to stop the abuse, and as it makes their service look busy and popular, they potentially aren't going to be interested in being too aggressive on blocking fake accounts, unless they're being very obviously abusive. Personally, I still get plenty of accounts following me which have just started, then spewed spam links to people for days, and Twitter hasn't worked on a way to automatically shut them down (although it seems to happen pretty quickly after I use the Block facility to report them.) So I can't see that they're going to get around to shutting down harder to notice fake accounts very quickly either. Not until it becomes a large enough problem that the mainstream press starts complaining about it.
I wasn't sure if the client company were aware most of their followers didn't really exist. I was trying to work out how we'd broach it with them when we were dumped off our bit of the project. I couldn't work out what all the fake followers were for, I presumed at the time it was just to make it look like the social media guy was doing his job well and it was all going well, when in reality he was just buying followers in. The idea he was trying to bring in more natural followers by having a big follower count at least means he could have been acting more ethically than I thought.
Given updates in Google over the last couple of years to make social signals more and more important, it could be a lot of people buying likes, fake followers and retweets are just trying to influence the rankings of the company/page mentioned in Google's search results by showing a lot of social activity about that company.
If this is the case, the abuse will continue and probably get much worse until either Twitter cracks down on it or Google dial back on how strongly it takes signals from Twitter. Unfortunately, given how much blog spamming there still is, even after everyone started using 'nofollow' on comment links, it may not make much difference to the level of abuse. Lots of people spend time trying to manipulate Google in ways much of the SEO industry believe don't work any more.
Given this, it'll be up to Twitter to stop the abuse, and as it makes their service look busy and popular, they potentially aren't going to be interested in being too aggressive on blocking fake accounts, unless they're being very obviously abusive. Personally, I still get plenty of accounts following me which have just started, then spewed spam links to people for days, and Twitter hasn't worked on a way to automatically shut them down (although it seems to happen pretty quickly after I use the Block facility to report them.) So I can't see that they're going to get around to shutting down harder to notice fake accounts very quickly either. Not until it becomes a large enough problem that the mainstream press starts complaining about it.