Every social media platform, including X, formerly Twitter, has its fair share of fake users. These accounts will inevitably end up in your follower list, especially when you have a public profile. How do you check fake Twitter followers? More importantly, is allowing them to be a part of your follower count a good idea?
This guide answers all the questions you may have on this topic. You’ll learn to identify these users in your follower list and why you must remove them quickly.
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What Are Fake Twitter Followers?
Fake Twitter followers are accounts created to boost a user’s follower count and engagement metrics. These profiles rely on scripts or automation techniques to pretend they are real people. People also refer to these users as Twitter bot accounts.
There are several third-party services where you can increase your follower count and engagement for a price. In most cases, these websites provide fake followers and accounts.
4 Reasons To Remove Fake Twitter Followers
What’s the harm in allowing fake accounts to be a part of your follower base? Below are four reasons why you should find and remove such profiles.
1. They Make It Difficult To Understand What Your Target Audience Likes
As highlighted earlier, people use Twitter bot accounts to boost their engagement metrics. While this may seem like a good idea, it can have significant downsides in the long run.
For starters, it becomes harder to learn what your target audience is looking for. When you try new content or different formats, the fake Twitter followers may engage with these posts.
As a result, you’ll assume your audience likes what you’re trying and continue publishing similar tweets. If you keep going along this path, you’ll notice your engagement metrics start to drop. By the time you understand what’s going on, your genuine followers may lose interest and unfollow you.
2. They Can Damage Your Credibility
Although some fake users occasionally engage with your tweets, most are inactive followers. In other words, they won’t like, repost, or quote your tweets.
For this reason, it’s easy for anyone to realize that your follower count is inauthentic. People will notice that the large follower count doesn’t match the engagement your posts get.
If you’re trying to establish yourself as an influencer, these types of followers will damage your credibility. Brands will always check an influencer’s engagement rate and other metrics before contacting them. When they notice your followers are inactive, they will stay away from your profile.
3. They Will Spread Spam by Replying to Your Posts or via Direct Messages
Spam accounts are popular among cybercriminals because of how easy it is to create these profiles. They use such accounts to spread spam and malicious links.
Usually, when a fake user follows you, they send you unknown URLs through direct messages (DMs). These links may phish your financial information or ask you to download malware to your device.
Similarly, these accounts may post random replies with malicious links in your tweet’s comment section. Not only does this affect your credibility, but it also puts your real followers at risk.
4. They Make It Harder To Achieve Your Social Media Goals
Another issue with keeping inactive followers is that they won’t help you reach your social media goals. When it comes to directing them towards your website or blog, they will never click your links.
If you want to promote your products and services, these users won’t check out your offerings. They also won’t share your posts with other people on or outside this platform.
As a result, you may assume it’s not worth the time or effort to establish yourself on this network.
How To Check Fake Followers on Twitter: 3 Ways To Detect Non-Genuine Followers
This guide on how to check fake followers on Twitter shows you three ways to detect them quickly.
1. Analyze the User’s Handle, Profile Picture, and Posts
When you get a notification about a new follower, you must first visit their profile page. Compare the account holder with the following Twitter bot checker checklist to see if they are genuine or fake:
- Does the user have a random username? The X handle doesn’t make sense, nor is it relevant to the account holder’s display name. It often looks like the user mashed their keyboard to generate a username, like @ge19klkhj2fd. In most cases, these accounts are fake, and you must unfollow them immediately.
- Take a look at the user’s display photo. Real people will use personalized images as they care about how their profile looks to visitors. Most fake users won’t have an image or will use a public photo. They may also use images of real people or pictures depicting adult content. You can cross-check this by reverse-searching the pictures.
- Go through the user’s posts, if available. Fake profiles may not have any tweets, but this can also be true for real people. This is because not everyone is comfortable posting publicly. You may also come across random posts that don’t make any sense. They’ll often contain grammatical and spelling errors, which is a dead giveaway of a bogus account.
Ideally, any user meeting the above three requirements is likely fake.
2. Check Out Their Follower and Following Metrics
Another easy way to identify inauthentic users is to review their followers and following metrics. Generally, these profiles will follow many accounts, but their follower count is low. This is usually the case because real people don’t have any reason to follow such users.
You should also go through their following list, as they tend to follow other fake accounts. They aim to make their profiles look authentic.
3. Wait and See if They Send a Random Direct Message With an Unknown Link
Fake users often have malicious intent, and discovering their real intentions doesn’t take long. These accounts tend to send a random direct message out of the blue. It often contains an unknown link, which will take you to a phishing website. These URLs may also download malicious software on your device, putting it at risk.
If any user sends a similar message, they are most likely not genuine. You must immediately unfollow them to keep your account safe. Also, avoid opening such links, as you never know what lies on the other side.
How To Check if Someone Has Fake Twitter Followers: 2 Solutions
Sometimes, you’re curious about the quality of followers of a specific user. In other cases, you may want to collaborate with an influencer but need to know if they have fake followers. Here’s how to check if someone has fake Twitter followers.
1. Go Through Their Follower List Manually
A simple way to determine if fake X users follow an account is to review their follower list. The instructions below explain how to do this manually:
- Open X on your device and visit the Twitter user’s profile page.
- Left-click their follower count to see all the users who follow them.
- Click on the display name of any account holder to see their profile page.
- Analyze their profile photo, username, bio, and tweets. Also, review who they follow and who follows them.
- Return to the individual’s follow page and repeat steps 3 – 4.
2. Use a Third-Party Tool To Check Fake Twitter Followers
The above fake follower check Twitter technique works when a user has a handful of followers. What if there are thousands of accounts following this individual? In this case, it’s impractical to review each follower manually.
Fortunately, you can use third-party tools like Followeraudit. Its free tier allows you to review users with up to 5,000 followers. You can run two Twitter audits daily, which is sufficient for most users. However, the individual must have at least 200 followers to start the scan.
It will identify fake accounts, inactive users, and bot followers and show them in a donut chart. There’s a followers quality graph, which assigns a score to these users. Also, it gives you the following metrics:
- Followers with a low number of posts
- People with a low follower count
- Users without any information in their bios
- Accounts whose follower-to-following ratio is irregular
- Individuals without any location data
- People who don’t use the URL section on their profile page
- Users whose username and display name look like spam
You can also download the report to analyze the various metrics. This tool will work as long as the user has a public profile.
Should You Use a Twitter Follower Bot?
No, you should avoid using a Twitter follower bot, as this goes against the platform’s rules. According to X’s platform manipulation and spam, users shouldn’t follow others mindlessly, especially when using automated services. Also, using services that promise follower growth violates the network’s rules.
What happens when you use such services? For starters, the platform may lock your account for suspicious behavior.
If this happens to your profile, you must verify yourself to unlock your profile. The platform may also ask you to solve the reCAPTCHA test.
It can also limit your account, preventing you from using various features.
Use TweetDelete To Find and Delete Tweets With Spam Comments From Fake Users
Bookmark this guide on Twitter fake follower check to know what to look for when you get a new follower. After removing them from your follower list, you should report them.
As covered in this guide, fake X users will leave spam comments on your posts. These replies not only undermine your credibility but can also affect the safety of your target audience. You must remove such posts as soon as possible. X only allows you to erase one post per tap, so you need a third-party service like TweetDelete.
Thanks to its handy custom filter, you’ll easily find posts with spam comments. After you know which posts to remove, use the mass-delete tweets utility. It will erase any number of posts with a few clicks.
If you want to manage your account automatically, run the auto-delete tweets task. TweetDelete runs in the background and automatically removes posts from a specific date range. There’s also the option to delete particular tweets by letting it know the common phrases and hashtags in these posts.
Follow this guide on how to check fake Twitter followers and subscribe to TweetDelete to protect your reputation on X!
