Twitter bots have proliferated into an epidemic. The automated accounts annoy real Twitter users, spread fake news, and artificially bring topics to public attention. They also disrupt PR and marketing campaigns.

Estimates vary, but some research says bots represent 15 percent of Twitter users, or 48 million accounts. More worrisome, Twitter bots account for a disproportionate 50 percent of the site’s traffic. Your company’s account and your own account likely contain at least some bot followers.

Automated Twitter bots are programed to post and engage with other users, often around certain keywords and often in concert with botnets, or networks of other fake accounts. Automated responses are not inherently evil, but the large numbers of fake accounts coupled with their nefarious motivations cause major problems.

Following charges that Russian-sponsored bots interfered with the 2016 election, Twitter said it had suspended over 117,000 “malicious applications” in the previous four months alone, and was catching more than 450,000 suspicious logins per day. Twitter’s very nature poses a hurdle, according to University of Oxford researcher Robert Gorwa. It has an open application programming interface (API) that lets third-party applications post tweets on a user’s behalf. That “feature” has boosted the platform’s growth but makes it susceptible to fake accounts.

“Today, the sheer scale of the problem is staggering,” Gorwa writes in Quartz.

Get-Followers-Quick Schemes

Feeling pressure to quickly gain followers to show they are popular, some brands purchase fake followers through paid services that boast they can magically deliver thousands of followers overnight.

Experts urge brands to avoid such schemes. Hard work over time is the only legitimate way to build a strong follower base. Purchasing bot accounts can decrease engagement rates, since bots are less likely to comment on or share tweets from accounts they follow. The strategy can also damage the brand’s image since savvy social media users can plainly see the lack of engagement and suspicious followers, warns digital marketer Crys Wiltshire at gShift Lab. Worse, it risks getting the account flagged and even suspended.

Some influencers on Twitter purchase fake followers to create a false appearance of popularity and demand higher payments from brands. The purchasing of fake followers also occurs on Instagram and other social media services.

“For the influencer marketing industry, fake followers are creating influencers who might as well be selling brands air,” Wiltshire writes. Moreover, influencers with large numbers of bot followers push out influencers who have smaller but real audiences — and real influence. Most brands mistakenly consider only follower numbers and ignore more genuine engagement metrics.

Do You Know a Bot When You See One?

Scanning through the follower list of an influencer or other Twitter users can give a sense of the number of fake followers. Look for these red flags:

No profile photo – an empty “egg head” image is a red flag, although it could also be a sign of laziness.

No bio. Another red flag, although it could also merely indicate laziness. Twitter best practices call for uploading a profile photo and completing a bio.

Stock images or a profile image shared by other fake accounts. You can search Google to find if the image has been used by others. Right click on the profile image and copy the link location, then search for the image in Google Images.

Boring tweets. Their tweets typically lack personality or personal references and consist only of retweets, replies, or duplicate or near-duplicate tweets. Many bots sometimes post senseless gibberish. Also be suspicious of nothing but quotes, especially when from a single source.

No tweets in years. Check the time stamp of the most recent tweets.

Low or no follower counts. They often follow thousands of other users but have few followers themselves. However, they may have a large number of followers that are also bots.

Unrealistic numbers of tweets. They churn out hundreds of tweets a day or tens of thousands of tweets in short order.

Only one subject. They often share nothing but content related to one subject or ideology like articles exclusively from far-right and far-left sites.

Automated Solutions

The trouble is that wading through follower lists is time consuming. At least several programmers have created apps that they say can identify bot accounts and audit accounts.

Twitter Audit – Analyzes Twitter handles for portions of fake followers. (Its audit gave @GleanTeam, the Glean.info Twitter account, a 99 percent quality score.)

Fakers by Status People – Reports the percentage of fake followers on a Twitter profile and identifies how many followers are inactive and lists suspicious accounts.

Botcheck.me – A Chrome extension that reveals if an account is a likely bot.

Bottom Line: Ubiquitous fake robot accounts called bots can wreck PR and social media marketing campaigns. Twitter is trying to eliminate the bogus profiles, but the problem seems overwhelming. Knowing how to spot possible bots and using automated tools can limit bots. Above all, it’s imperative for legitimate brands and organizations to avoid purchasing fake followers.

Glean.info grants permission to republish this article provided that the republished version contains a link to the original article on the Glean.info Blog.

William Comcowich

William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.