How Ghost Followers Destroy Your Social Accounts

Ghost fol­low­ers are des­troy­ing your social media accounts.

Many are try­ing to out­smart social media algorithms by acquir­ing many inact­ive fol­low­ers. Others don’t have the time to weed out and block bot followers. 

Turns out that allow­ing any­one to fol­low you has a det­ri­ment­al effect.

Here’s why:

How Ghost Followers Destroyed My Twitter Account

A few years ago, I des­troyed one of my Twitter accounts this way. 

I fol­lowed back accounts with high fol­low-back ratios to get them to stay on as fol­low­ers — as opposed to fol­low­ing people I genu­inely wanted to inter­act with, wheth­er they fol­lowed me or not. 

That account now has 16K+ fol­low­ers, but recov­er­ing it back to health has proven almost impossible.

We find ourselves in a situ­ation where thou­sands and thou­sands of influ­en­cer wan­nabes and oth­er types of social media fakers are buy­ing ghost fol­low­ers and deploy­ing fol­low-back soft­ware to boost their numbers. 

Most people under­stand that the fol­low­ers you get won’t engage with their con­tent, as I did, but the actu­al situ­ation is worse. 

Much worse.

I did­n’t buy my fol­low­ers, sure, but I did use a stu­pid fol­low-back tech­nique — and des­troyed my Twitter account as a result.

Social Algorithms Stats in the Trash

While the math­em­at­ic­al aspects of a social media algorithm might be com­plex, the essen­tial func­tion isn’t. Algorithms simply try their best to fig­ure out what users want by pre­dict­ing their behaviours. 

While the algorithmic for­mula is com­plex, the essen­tial social sig­nals are easy to under­stand for any­one — it’s all about engage­ment (what your poten­tial audi­ence does on the plat­form) and author­ity (your track record on the platform).

On a social plat­form, you’re first and fore­most com­pet­ing with yourself.

Let’s do a thought experiment:

Imagine hav­ing pre­cisely 100K fol­low­ers, but for some reas­on, 90K are ghost fol­low­ers, like bot accounts, fake accounts, spam accounts and the like. There might even be some real people who allowed you for the wrong reas­ons; there­fore, they will nev­er ever engage with your content.

Okay, so you still have 10K real fol­low­ers. That’s not too bad, con­sid­er­ing. If you could pub­lish some con­tent and get 10K shares?

But, of course, you don’t get 10K shares. You might not even get five shares.

The reas­on is dev­ast­at­ingly simple: your algorithmic stats are now in the trash. Sure, as long as the social net­work shares your con­tent with only those 10K fol­low­ers, you can main­tain account integ­rity. But it’s an uphill battle.

Ghosts Don’t Care About Great Content

Great con­tent alone will rarely make up for hav­ing a large por­tion of fol­low­ers with low scores on engage­ment and author­ity. Therefore, a massive fol­low­ing of ghosts could be a math­em­at­ic­al pois­on to your attempts to nego­ti­ate the algorithm.

Yes, the algorithm will col­lect per­form­ance data on everything you pub­lish. Still, con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, this data is mainly used to error-cor­rect the algorith­m’s accur­acy, not to determ­ine your authority. 

The social media algorithm has made most of its pre­dic­tions before you pub­lish your content. 

Posting great con­tent (mean­ing: con­tent that per­forms bet­ter than “your” algorith­m’s ini­tial pre­dic­tion) will only micro-adjust in your favour, but only ever so slightly. Such micro-adjust­ments rarely make up for hav­ing 90% ghosts, not in the long term.

What does this mean?

What To Do About Ghost Followers

What can you do if you have a high ratio of ghost fol­low­ers? What can you do? 

There’s no easy solu­tion, unfor­tu­nately. There’s the hard­core approach, of course. You could go through your list of fol­low­ers and block all those prom­in­ent “ghost fol­low­er” accounts. This will get rid of ghost fol­low­ers quickly, but it comes at a cost:

Frequent block­ing will tell the algorithm that you’re not inter­ested in enga­ging with those who have chosen to fol­low you. Short- to mid-term, this is likely to impact your author­ity negatively. 

The softer approach won’t strike back at you as hard: You simply make sure that you’re at least not fol­low­ing ghost fol­low­ers back, and then you hope that they will unfol­low you, too, over time. This, of course, takes time.

There are two addi­tion­al altern­at­ives, but these aren’t viable options for most people: Either you close your account and start fresh, or you attract so many real fol­low­ers that their num­bers will dwarf your exist­ing num­ber of ghost followers.

Here are a few rules of thumb for keep­ing clear of ghost followers:

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How To Avoid Ghost Followers

Inactive and pass­ive fol­low­ers, ghost fol­low­ers, will des­troy your engage­ment scores and under­mine your social media reach and growth. 

Here are a few rules of thumb for keep­ing clear of ghost followers:

• Grow organ­ic­ally from the start. Having a small but highly engaged com­munity is bet­ter than attract­ing huge bulks of ghost fol­low­ers — espe­cially if you share your author­ity with them by enga­ging with them back.
• Stay con­sist­ent in one niche. Attracting a homo­gen­ous audi­ence (in terms of what exact con­tent they typ­ic­ally will engage with) is crit­ic­al for long-term suc­cess in social media. ¹Silfwer, J. (2016, May 25). The Follower Contract. Doctor Spin | The PR Blog. https://​doc​tor​spin​.net/​f​o​l​l​o​w​e​r​-​c​o​n​t​r​a​ct/
• Engage stra­tegic­ally. Who you engage with (fol­low, like, com­ment, share) will send neces­sary sig­nals to the algorithm. Ensure to engage con­sist­ently with the par­tic­u­lar audi­ence you want to attract.
• Remove or unsub­scribe ghosts. When pos­sible, pro­act­ively remove inact­ive fol­low­ers by either elim­in­at­ing or unsub­scrib­ing them. Not all social net­works allow for this, but you should use this tac­tic wherever it’s applicable.

Learn more: How Ghost Followers Destroy Your Social Media Accounts

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