I'm pretty good at recognizing bot accounts and blocking them when they follow me on Twitter, but I inevitably miss some, so I just spun through my followers list and blocked about 30 bots. I like to periodically do this, but it does take some effort, which begs the question…
Why block/Report bot followers?
Why take the time? Why not leave the bot accounts to boost your follower count?
Well, as a social media manager in my day job, I have reasons...
First and foremost, I don't believe in "vanity metrics". It doesn't matter how high your follower count is if it’s full of "low quality" bot accounts that never interact with you or buy the book you're selling. This is the same reason that I never advise anyone to “buy” followers. While it’s true that an account with a high number of followers carries the psychological weight of being more legitimate and important than an account with a low number of followers, it’s just not worth it to pad that number with bots. The best practice is always to grow your follower organically over time. If you’ve got money to throw behind pacing ads and boosting posts, you can accelerate the process, but targeting the right audience is always going to pay dividends whether you do that organically or use a platform’s paid audience targeting tools.
It doesn't matter how high your follower count is if it’s full of "low quality" bot accounts that never interact with you or buy the book you're selling.
We aren't able to curate our followers as easily as we can curate the accounts we are following, but there are platform tools like the block function that we can use to eliminate bots from following us.
It's important to report and block bot accounts for several reasons even though the majority of them are inert once they are created. For one, it sends a signal to the platform that the account is suspicious which makes it easier for them to identify it as fake and remove it. So by reporting and blocking, you're helping improve the platform for everyone.
I liken it to picking up rubbish - if we all do a bit the world's a better place.
— Fiona Lake (@FionaLakeAus) September 9, 2019
Fakes are getting more cunning. The first accounts they follow can very telling. Also, odd mixtures.
Secondly, blocking bot accounts is a matter of principal. They were created for some evil purpose, either to boost the vanity metrics of some shitty brand or make a beauty blogger look more important than they are, or to go on the attack against another account or send DMs to defraud the gullible. A bot account may even have been created to manipulate public opinion. So taking the time to block them feels like doing my civic duty. It's time I'll willingly sacrifice to help keep social media platforms useful and safe for real people.
How do you know it’s a bot and not a real person?
Recognizing a bot account is easy. They are usually named something like "Richard76299006" or "Angela29079591" and they will be following about two thousand accounts, but usually have fewer than 200 followers. They often won't have a cover image and will have been recently created accounts.
Don't let multiple photos of the same face and a coherent bio fool you. It’s still a bot. Report it as fake and block it!
Bot accounts will almost always have a photo of a Baby Boomer white guy as their profile image. Sometimes they will claim to be ex military, or a doctor or lawyer in their one line bio. There are also a lot of bot accounts that use young, attractive women as their profile photos who claim to be nurses or teachers.
Sometimes bot accounts will not have any original tweets, but will have retweeted a selection of things like photos of classic cars or articles that make them look like they are a real person with a common hobby. The tell is that there will almost always be fewer than a half dozen tweets or retweets in total. They may even have a few tweets with photos featuring the same face. Don't let multiple photos of the same face and a coherent bio fool you. It’s still a bot. Report it as fake or suspicious and block it.
Here’s a gallery of some classic examples of bot accounts:
Why do I keep being targeted by Bots?
If you participate in certain communities and use common hashtags like #WritingCommunity, your account will be targeted by these bots because it’s an easy way for them to follow thousands of related accounts in quick succession. It may be a function of having so many legitimate account names already aggregated in a list that are easy to target en masse, but others have suggested the bot creators think they can camouflage themselves by following similar accounts from the same community.
Another common tactic is to find lists such as the #WritingCommunity lists and try to follow as many as possible to look like they are part of the community. Even going so far as to rapid fire RT applicable tweets with no content of their own as camouflage.
— Lord Hades (@CERobbAuthor) September 7, 2019
I don’t think this is an accurate assessment of why so many people in the Writing Community find themselves the target of bots on a daily basis. For one, I doubt that this level of care and attention is being deployed by bot creators. Also, if the true purpose of following a large numbers of related accounts was to camouflage themselves as part of the community to appear more legitimate, I believe they would do a better job wording their bios. I think it’s more a function of how the creators are leveraging the Twitter API than anything else.
Many authors who participate in the Twitter Writing Community report two or three of these accounts following them every day. The variety of scammers who randomly show up in your DMs are less common, but still a nuisance. If you haven’t been blocking all of these accounts from following you from the very beginning, you could have amassed hundreds of fake followers over time. And if you decide you need to go through your followers list and weed out the bots, this could require a considerable time commitment.
Are you wondering how many of your followers are fakes?
There is a really simple 3rd party tool that can help you identify the percentage of your following that are suspected bots.
I recommend Twitter Audit as a way to quickly gauge if you have a problem that needs your attention, or if it’s not worth investing the time to go weed out the 2 fake accounts hiding amongst your thousands of legitimate fans. I, myself, used this tool recently and learned I had 99% real followers, but that two were suspect. I made the determination that spending time trying to find the 2 stealthy bots wasn’t a good use of my time. The platform may eventually shut down those accounts for me, so I may need never worry about them.
One thing I wouldn’t advise is for you to post one of those “post a selfie if you’re real” tweets that periodically make the rounds of the Writing Community. These are completely harmless and fun ways to connect with your Tweeps, but it’s not actually going to give you any indication of how many of your followers are real people due to the nature of the feed algorithm and other factors. So, if you want to do one of these high engagement posts to get to know your followers “face-to-face”, by all means do. Just don’t word it like you’re accusing everyone of being a fraud or you’re really desperate to cull everyone from your followers list who doesn’t respond. That just makes it sounds like you don’t know how Twitter works ;)
Oh yes, and before I forget…
Why take this advice from me?
I’m a social media manager with 15 years of experience in brand development. I’ve worked with over 40 national and international organizations to strategize and implement social media campaigns and my day job is creating social media content and managing the online presence of an international NGO. I’m a member of the Social Media Marketing Society and TogetHERDigital.
The founder of the the Social Media Marketing Society, Mike Stelzner, once praised one of my viral marketing tactics to his YouTube audience and tried to implement it at the Social Media Marketing World international conference…so I’ve got that going for me.
You know what else I’d like to have going for me? You to sign up for my email list. I’ve got a great lineup of posts scheduled where we take a spin through my reading log that contains every book I’ve read since 2002.