The Giant Business Of Selling Social Media Followers And Fans

MANHATTAN, N.Y. - May 18, 2014 - PRLog -- An Associated Press examination has found a growing global marketplace for fake followers and fans, which tech companies struggle to police. Its not a secret that recent studies are showing how start-up companies are trying to capitalize on the new opportunity to make millions of dollars by selling fake likes and followers on social media.

For as little as $5 dollars, businesses worldwide are able to purchase almost about anything from LinkedIn connections to make this social network members appear more employable to Instagram followers to give more influence to the new fashion websites.

"Anytime there's a monetary value added to clicks, there's going to be people going to the dark side," said Mitul Gandhi, CEO of seoClarity, a Des Plaines, Illinois, social media marketing firm that weeds out phony online engagements.

In the meantime Italian security researchers and bloggers Andrea Stroppa and Carla De Micheli estimated in 2013 that sales of false Twitter followers have the potential to bring in $40 million to $360 million to date, and that fake Facebook likes activities could easily bring in $200 million a year.

As a result, many businesses, whose values are based on credibility, have entire teams doggedly pursuing the buyers and brokers of fake social media followers. But each time they crack down on one, another, more creative scheme emerges.

Last December YouTube wiped out billions of music industry video views after some of their software auditors found that some of their hosted videos apparently had millions of fake views. Its parent-company, Google, is also constantly battling people who generate fake clicks on their adsense ads.

For Facebook this issue is very important particularly because this social media network was built on the principle that users are real people. And its latest report shows that as many as 14.1 million of its 1.18 billion active users are fraudulent accounts.

LinkedIn spokesman Doug Madey said buying connections "dilutes the member experience," violates their user agreement and can also prompt account closures.

Dhaka, Bangladesh, a city of 7 million in South Asia, is also the capital of click farms.

The CEO of Dhaka-based social media promotion firm Unique IT World said he has paid workers to manually click on clients' social media pages, making it harder for Facebook, Google and others to catch them. "Those accounts are not fake, they were genuine," Shaiful Islam said.

A recent check on Facebook showed Dhaka was the most popular city for many, including soccer star Leo Messi, who has 51 million likes; Facebook's own security page, which has 7.7 million likes; and Google's Facebook page, which has 15.2 million likes.

In 2013, the State Department, which has more than 400,000 likes and was recently most popular in Cairo, said it would stop buying Facebook fans after its inspector general criticized the agency for spending $630,000 to boost the numbers.

In one case, its fan tally rose from about 10,000 to more than 2.5 million.

Sometimes there are plausible explanations for click increases. For example, Burger King's most popular city was, for a few weeks this year, Karachi, Pakistan, after the chain opened several restaurants there.

In U.S.A, in the meantime, the Federal Trade Commission and several state attorney generals have cracked down on fake endorsements or reviews on Yelp, but have still not worked on clicks. Meanwhile, hundreds of online businesses sell clicks and social media accounts from around the world.

AddTwitter-Followers.com, for example sells 500+ Twitter followers for $5.99.

SocialMediaCombo.Net sells 1,000 Instagram followers for $19 while in CheapSocialMediaSeo.com one can find Facebook packs starting at $17 dollars..

It's a lucrative business, said the president and CEO of Addtwitter-followers.

"Our client businesses usually purchase our social media optimization services because they're afraid that when people go to their Facebook page or Twitter account page and they only see 12 or 15 likes or followers, they're going to lose potential customers," he said. The company official spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he recently moved his company offshore to avoid litigation or cease-and-desist notices from Facebook and Instagram.

"Today, we are living in a tight competition world that is forcing people to compete with many tricks," he added.

Tony Harris, who does social media marketing for major Hollywood movie firms, said he would love to be able to give his clients massive numbers of Twitter followers and Facebook fans, but buying them from random strangers is not very effective or ethical.

David Burch, at TubeMogul, a video marketing firm based in Emeryville, Calif., said buying clicks to promote clients is a grave error. "It's bad business," he said, "and if an advertised ever found out you did that, they'd never do business with you again."