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Post Info TOPIC: The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty
budnonymous


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The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty
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The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty

 

By Tom Foremski  February 14, 2012, 5:45pm PST

Summary: Increasing numbers of studies of social networks point to much smaller numbers of real and active users - sharply reducing the value of the platforms, and social media marketing.

The numbers of users reported by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many other sites, are closely watched. They reveal trends in adoption and they are one of the few public metrics available to analysts trying to assign value to companies preparing an initial public offering.

But how accurate are these numbers?

In some anecdotal cases, the number of users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles.

No user profiles means very little usable data for marketing or advertising campaigns. This is a huge hole in social media platforms.

It means corporate marketers and advertisers will not be able to reach and engage with the numbers they expect, resulting in increased costs and a discouraging ROI.

If corporations aren't able to use social media to reach large numbers of consumers, the value of platforms such as Facebook will be severely diminished.

How large is this problem of fake and empty user profiles?

Here is an analysis performed by Kevin Kelly, a former editor of Wired magazine and a book author, on 560,000 people that have him in their G+ "circles."

 

read the rest



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budnonymous


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In case anyone missed it...

 

Fake forum comments are 'eroding' trust in the web

Trust in information on the web is being damaged by the huge numbers of people paid by companies to post comments online, say researchers.

Fake posters can "poison" debate and make people unsure about who they can trust, the study suggests.

Some firms have created tens of thousands of fake accounts to flood chat forums and skew debate.

The researchers say there are reliable ways to spot fakes and urge websites to do more to police users.

The researchers from Canada and China say paying people to post comments is an "interesting strategy in business marketing" but it is not a benign activity.

"Paid posters may create a significant negative effect on the online communities, since the information from paid posters is usually not trustworthy," they wrote.

Battles

In some cases, rival companies have used competing armies of workers to wage comment wars that confused members of the public looking for unbiased information.

The researchers say the fake comments can overwhelm some users, causing them to find it hard to trust any information found online.

They give the example of a spike in activity on a World of Warcraft chat forum on the Chinese website Baidu.

A thread titled "Junpeng Jia, your mother asked you to go back home for dinner!" received over 300,000 replies over a two day period.

A PR company later claimed it had employed 800 individuals to run 20,000 separate accounts on the site to help maintain interest in the videogame while it was down for maintenance.

Growing problem

While the practice of flooding forums with fake comments is most widespread in China, where such posters are called the Internet Water Army, it is becoming common in other nations too.

The US military is known to use fakes to infiltrate chat forums to gather information about potential terror groups.

Similarly many Facebook pages are plagued by bogus friends and "social bots" that are used to stage debates.

Many marketing firms also seed forums with comments in a bid to create "viral" interest in a company or event.

However, fakes can be spotted by analysing their patterns of activity and the words they use, say the researchers.

Fakes are more likely to start new comment threads, make inane comments rather than add to a debate, and repeat former comments with minor changes, the study suggests.

The researchers say they are refining software tools to help website administrators tackle the "painful" problem.



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budnonymous


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Just running a couple quick searches on ebay yields plenty of results for fake social media fans, friends, subscribers etc.

Note the bottom ad. The seller attained TRS with a feedback of just 77 and a very short membership duration BTW.

I thought ebay disallowed purely digital products back in 2008 anyway?

fakesocialmediaforsale.png

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

 

 But it's even more blantant on twitter. Note that paypal is the preferred payment method.

twitterbuyfollowers480.png

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

So as we see again, wherever there is fraud, fakes, cheating etc... ebay and paypal always figure prominently.

This  not even a sliver of what's out there either.

In the bigger picture, if the entire web actually did get taken down, as in the most recent Anonymous related FUD, would it really be such a loss? Maybe mostly to scammers?







-- Edited by budnonymous on Wednesday 22nd of February 2012 06:48:41 AM

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budnonymous


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Sunday, 07 July 2013 17:12

Fake Twitter accounts generate big bucks for underground economy

 
 
 
 
 
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^
About time this stuff gets a little more mention.
 
You can go to twitter and/or ebay anytime you want and search for followers, subscribers, friends etc for twitter, instragram, youtube, fakebook, you name it... fake fake fake... and guess which payment service is preferred? That's just a tiny tiny part of what's out there... Seriously now, you can obtain fake items, services (whatever) you never dreamed of! Anything goes. Anything.


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budnonymous


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social_media_followers_for_sale_site_320e_20130713.png

The latest fake social media follower for sale site. Somehow, I get the impression this all is allowed to occur because the money trail likely leads all the way to WallStreet...

 

You'll notice at the page bottom right, that paypal is the preferred method of payment.

How are fake social media followers different than counterfeit?

Does Paypal terms of use allow blatant counterfeit?  erm ... no, ... wait... nevermind. dumb question. I keep forgetting the selective nature of enforcement/application of PayPal policies. bwhahahaaaa

PayPal deserves a lot of credit for sleazing up the whole www.

 



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budnonymous


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more on this. First the youtube teaser:

 

 

now the entire report:

Celebs, Brands and Fake Fans - C4 Mon Aug 05 8pm

 

Also seeing that sleazebay is going to make effort into being a social site.  rotflmao. Counterfeit Capital of the World!  fakebaY!



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