Fake Likes, Followers and Reviews
Last week we looked at “Click Farms“, and now we are going to look at how do you detect fake clicks, likes, followers, and reviews.
We all know that the more likes, your page or post-receive, the more likely it is to be effective and generate money in the long run. Wait, what, you didn’t know that you can generate money using Social Media? In fact here is a list of 2020’s top earners and how much they have earned. (source)
#10 – Jeffree Star – Earnings: $15 million
#9 – David Dobrik – Earnings: $15.5 million
#8 – Blippi (Stevin John) – Earnings: $17 million
#7 – Nastya (Anastasia Radzinskaya) – $18.5 million
#6 – Preston Arsement – Earnings: $19 million
#5 – Markiplier (Mark Fischbach) – Earnings: $19.5 million
#4 – Rhett and Link – Earnings: $20 million
#3 – Dude Perfect – Earnings: $23 million
#2 – Mr. Beast (Jimmy Donaldson) – Earnings: $24 million
#1 – Ryan Kaji – Earnings: $29.5 million
This makes Social Media and content creation a huge money maker, in fact, most of the top YouTube influencers have quit their day jobs to be full-time influencers. With more views and followers, the more likely it is for a real person to like and follow and that translates to money.
But how do you and I check to see if the likes, views, followers, and reviews are fake?
Reviews and comments are usually much easier to detect than bogus data. If there are short and quick comments like “Great post” or “Interesting” then chances are it is not a real comment. Often true followers will engage with the influencer and make a more genuine statement, as an example “I loved the video, I thought that this one was so much better and interesting compared to your last one about XYZ.” If you are a follower and you notice a sudden and large increase in followers then this is likely the result of a click farm.
You can also look at the number of followers and compare that to a post or video that is a few weeks old. If they have a few million followers, but their post or video has 10 views or likes, then that might be a great indicator of it being fake.
Many social media platforms will allow you to see where their other followers are from. If you see a large following in areas like China or India, this might be another indicator of a click farm.
Look at the content and the location, meaning if a bakery in a small town of 20,000 people has a following of 100,000, that might be an indication of something fishy going on.
Tools
There are also third-party tools available that you can use that will help you determine if the followers are fake or not. I’m not endorsing any one of these tools.
Phlanx – claims to allow you to audit Instagram Influencers. It does cost money but comes with a free month’s trial
Social Audit Pro – Looks at each of the profiles of the follower to see if they are complete and how active they are to determine if the follower is fake or real
Grin – Allows you to help determine if an Instagram/TikTok or YouTube influencer is credible or not
Just remember, not all large increases in followers or like are bad, and remember that it isn’t always a click farm.
As an example Facebook allows you to pay a small fee and “Boost” your post, which is their way of sharing your post with people outside of your circle. This could result in a huge increase in views or likes. Some companies also have employees who act like click farms, and they spend part of their day liking pages and posts for their company or other companies that they do business with.
There are also computer programs or ‘bots’ that are programmed to like posts and pages as well.
Fake reviews are real and next week we will talk about how they can affect you.
