If you are purchasing Twitter or Instagram followers, or Facebook fans or subscribers, you are getting yourself into hot water. Not only will a large fake following with very little engagement be detrimental to your Klout score, however people will easily know if you are buying followers or fans.

Not only will they know this by the fact that there is little to no real engagement within your network while you have an obscene number of followers/fans- however there are tools out there that people can use to easily discover how good your followers are. If you have 100,000 followers and not a lot of engagement, that right there is a giveaway that the majority of your followers are fake. Once it is confirmed with tools around that can measure that, your reputation will go down the drain. One tool that people can use to check up on the quality of Twitter users’ followers is called Status People. However, this tool from what I have found is not very accurate. There is a better one out there that is far more accurate in regards to finding out the quality of any Twitter users’ following- and it is called Social Baker’s Fake Follower Check. These tools give you the percentage of followers that are good, inactive and fake. If you have a following that is over 70{a0065375a7e2d1c093abc1aba7894b1ad713a40df7f413d8a34d916c8e570350} good, you are in good shape however, you still need to improve that and get your account cleaned up. You want to make your account as clean as you possibly can.

I am going to be very upfront and honest. Back around Christmas time I was doing a lot of experimenting on how easily it is to game Klout by doing various activities like one time I purchased retweets from Fiverr to see what would happen. In fact during a huge defensive post I had written about Klout back in January after seeing people repeatedly criticize it in Twitter chats- I mentioned a thing or two about those experiments I did. I also did a test to see what would happen to the score if I had bought bots, and I must say nothing did happen with either experiment. However, Klout has gotten very strict with how it measures your activity that if any blatant gaming of any type is discovered, you will be penalized. Anyway as a result of these experiments for a while I had some left over baggage. Meaning, I had some bots still sticking around even though a lot of them fell away. I had forgotten about this for a while until someone had pointed out that I needed to clean up my account. I immediately jumped on it. My account is quite clean for the most part now, however I still have more inactive followers than I would like, meaning they are not fakes however they do not interact a whole lot. I am slowly getting rid of those.

How am I getting rid of inactive accounts? I am slowly bit by bit blocking accounts that are simply just sitting there- doing nothing. It is not these accounts are necessarily fakes. What some people do is they open up a Twitter account, follow you and after a while forget about it and leave it. Then once they are interested they open up another account. Therefore, this is how these accounts many times appear inactive. You really don’t want those either, as much as you do not want fake bots attached to you account. Social Bakers gives you the opportunity to block fake accounts as well, however it does not give you the opportunity to block inactive followers. That I am doing on my own bit by bit.

How to Attract Good Followers

If you sit there all day following Twitter users in your niche is not going to do much for you. In fact if you follow more than 50-100 people a day you can get suspended. You do not want to do that. There are two very effective ways to attract followers- and that is not just following your friends’ accounts that you had found on Facebook or Xeeme.

If you want followers in your niche to follow you, this is what you need to do-

1. Retweet, Favorite and Mention Them- They will appreciate it more than you know. Twitter chats are a good way to find followers by interacting with them. However, a more effective approach is to do a hashtag search on a keyword that is relevant to your niche. You will find many Twitter users discussing interesting things in relation to what you are looking for. Retweet them, favorite them, and even mention them by replying to what they said. Be consistent with this, the majority of them will follow you in a heartbeat.

2. Tweet their Articles- Do a Google or Bing search on anything to do with your niche and you will find many blog posts written by others. Make sure you tweet the ones that you find interesting out, and make sure that the users’ Twitter handles are in the tweet or else they will not know that you retweeted them. You can easily find their handle by doing a search through Twitter on their name. Make sure you add via @twitteruser in the tweet. Many times however, if you tweet out an article or blog post written by someone, their handle is already there by default. They will be very appreciative of that- and most of the time will follow you.

It is a very slow way to increase your following however it does add up- and it works. Rome was not built in a day, and you will not end up with 100,000 legitimate followers overnight. I have been on Twitter for years and I don’t have that many followers. Most of my followers are of good quality and they are getting better every time now that I am removing my inactive followers slowly. Make sure your accounts are as clean as they can be. You will save yourself a lot of trouble later on.