When we talk about social media, its often in terms of creating great content, being consistent, and building responsive audiences. This time lets look at the audiences you have created and earned.
Whether you have a million Likes on Facebook or a thousand followers on Twitter, you need to make sure your audience is, in short, legit. If you have hundreds of followers who can’t do business with you because of geography, interests, or because they are fake then you are just shouting in an empty room.
This is why it is critical you pay attention, daily if you must, to weed out the bad apples who may jump into your audience. On Twitter, your follower list is public. Having a bunch of junk in there says just as much about the quality of your account as your tweets do.
As the screencast video above shows you, almost every day we check our new followers on Twitter to either place in interest lists or block anyone new who comes into our audience.
TWEET THIS: Know the difference between real and fake members of your #SocialMedia audience.
Here are a couple of examples on how to tell the difference between a real profile and a fake profile on Twitter:
REAL PROFILE
- This profile photo, while different, is actually of the person who is doing the tweeting. He also highlights in this photo the topics he is tweeting about thereby lending further credibility to the account.
- n Another good sign, his Twitter bio is filled out with keywords to his industry, links to his website and has his geographic location specified.
- Here we can see that followers of mine are following him as well. While you can’t endorse someone on Twitter, seeing that we have mutual connections is another sign of authenticity.
- Here we see the tweets he has sent are related to the topics in his bio. If we saw a bunch of unrelated information, or sales pitches here, it would be a sign we should block this person. The content looks legit so he is good to go!
FAKE PROFILE
- While this profile, by coincidence, shows her in workout clothes as well there is nothing else in the profile to suggest its connected to anything healthy. For some reason, most Twitter spam accounts choose photos of women in revealing attire as their profile photos.
- We can pretty much stop and block this account by looking at the bio. Words referencing “growing followers for $5” in bios are also common in spammers.
- At the time of this image, the spam account had spam-tweeted more than 3000 times but has 170ish followers. Another bad sign that leads us to the next point.
- Looking at their sent tweets shows more spam. There were a dozen more tweets like this promising social media audience growth before this one. As you can see in the video we are now reaching for the report and block function.
It may take a couple of minutes every day or so but we urge you to pay attention to the quality of the followers in your audience. If you need help with this, feel free to contact us any time!
