The Dark Side of Buying Friends in Social Media
When you look at a Twitter account these days, like most people, we tend to see what kind of following the person or business has, right? How influential are they when it comes talking about their product, their pricing or their passion.
Did you know that you can easily buy friends and appear more influential than you really are? Perceptions, unfortunately are everything in this world and I want to expose you to the dark side of buying friends in social media. I have learned in the tech press that you can now check the status of these fake friends within your own account, which I will address below.
A quick search on Google today will provide you with several companies claiming that you can “add” thousands of Twitter and Facebook followers for as low as $50. Sounds like a Ginsu knives commercial from the 1970′s. If you don’t believe me, go to Google and look up buying friends for Facebook and Twitter. I have seen services in the last few months that have made this offer but have never actually down it. I listened to my gut feeling and stayed away from this.
If you are at all interested in protecting your online reputation, which most should be interested, then you may want to use this free too to learn how many of your twitter follows are fake, how many are inactive and how many are good. Now, others can see how authentic you are as well.
Obviously, no one is worried about a good ranking and it appears the inactive accounts are from people that either have become distracted, bored or forgotten about their accounts. It is the percentage of fake accounts that might become alarming to those that are not buying their popularity.
So, in the interest of knowing where I stand, I typed in one of my twitter handles, the sportsinfo101.com real account. It is managed by me, produced by me and last I pinched, I am still real so I am not fake and either is my account. Here is what I found:
If you’d like to give this a try for yourself, you can either go http://statuspeople.com/ or just click here and give it a test drive.
The only downside of this app is that, although I learned that, according to status people 2% of my friends are fake, there was no way to view and evaluate the 2%. Maybe next version of their program.
