How To Make Sure That Account Is Worth Buying Before You Fork Over The Cash
Imagine a scenario in which you’re presented with a social media account to purchase. The seller gives you a brief overview of the account, and everything looks good to you. But there’s something nagging in the back of your head about the account. You just seem to be unsure if the deal is worthwhile compared to what’s being offered. Clearly, your best option is to vet the account before exchanging any money for it. How do you go about doing that?
Before deciding on the best tactics to vet the account statistics, you must first come to terms with what’s important to you concerning social media? Are you only concerned with accounts that have a high number of followers? Accounts with a lot of followers can be quite valuable as having a high amount of followers tends to mark the account as an expert or an influencer in their field. However, having thousands or hundreds of thousands of inactive followers doesn’t create engagement, and some social media users can spot those accounts fairly quickly.
Buying Followers
There are a variety of websites and services that will offer followers on different platforms. Some of these are paid services while others work on a follow-for-follow type of deal. Twiends is a popular service that offers both free and paid services. By following accounts listed on Twiends, you accrue points, which get used to “purchase” followers for your own account. However, if you don’t want to follow a ton of random accounts just to grow your own following, you can pay to have your account featured for a weekly fee. This means that more Twiends users will see your account and likely follow in exchange for the points to build their own following.
There are ways to tell if an account is all flash and no substance, and most of those ways involve diving into the following list. If you see off the bat that a lot of the account’s followers are foreign language accounts, this is a sign that most of the followers are paid for and not organic. Because so many of these “Pay For Followers” sites outsource the work to foreign countries, these accounts were likely created by click farms. Click farms are rampant in countries like China, Egypt, and the Philippines, where companies can pay workers low wages to create throwaway social media accounts and attach those to paying customers.
Foreign language followers aren’t always a sign that the account paid for followers, however. The original account owner could be bi- or tri-lingual, and their posts may have organically attracted fans in other countries. But if you noticed that all of the tweets and comments the account posts are in English, while many of their followers post only in Arabic, that’s a sign to proceed with caution.
Other Red Flags
On Twitter, one indication (though not an absolute) of a new account is a username that consists of a name followed by eight numbers, like @Michael12345678. These accounts tend to be created quickly for less than authentic purposes, and though can lead to engagement on posts, they tend to be discarded quickly.
Accounts missing profile images, bios, or locations can also be indicative of inauthenticity. Also, be sure to verify the spelling of the username. Swapping letters is a technique used to make accounts look legit, like using a capital “i” in place of a lowercase “L” in the word “real.” These little tricks help make an otherwise dubious account look authentic.
Follow For Follow
Another tactic some use to increase following count on social media is churning. Churn happens when an account owner will go on a sudden following spree, following any and all accounts they come into contact with in the hopes of getting a follow back. The owner will then wait a day or two and unfollow the accounts that didn’t follow back and try again. Though churned followers can impact engagement, they are not targeted followers and tend to just stick around for as long as the account continues to follow them.
Alongside churning is the “follow for follow” community. Follow for follow is exactly as it sounds; accounts guarantee that they will follow back provided you follow them first. These accounts aren’t looking for engagement or interaction. They merely want to get their numbers up. And though many of these accounts will remain active on the platform, they won’t help to increase your account’s impression. Most often, I wouldn’t be surprised if these accounts muted all of the people they follow as soon as they follow them just to reduce clutter in their own timeline.
It’s All About Engagement
But when it comes to value on social media, having a high following count is no longer the best litmus. The best way to tell if an account is valuable or not is through their engagement. Engagement is the act of liking or commenting on a post or tweet. It’s basically some sort of interaction on the part of your audience with the content you share. Some accounts with a high follower count out themselves as being inauthentic through the low engagement numbers on their content. For example, a Twitter account with 50,000 followers may look knowledgeable in their niche, however, if all of their tweets get only ten or fifteen likes, and maybe three or four replies, it’s easy to tell that the account holder likely paid for those followers, or obtained them in some other inauthentic way.
Test The Waters
Knowing the quality of the account certainly helps before buying said account, as it will allow you to best gauge the value of the account. There are tools online that will quickly allow you to vet the authenticity of the account. Social Blade, for example, will read the follower/following ratio of the account and gauge the type of content it posts, providing a letter grade based on the quality of the account. For example, when I search for my own personal account (@CrankyRaconetur), it shows me the net gain of my followers and following for the past month and awarded me with a grade of C. Social Blade allows you to vet the statistics for most major social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, however, in regards to Instagram, it will only search Creator or Business pages and not personal accounts.
You can also use a site like TwitterAudit to determine how many fake followers a Twitter account has. Just like with Social Blade, all you do is type in the account name, and the system with determine the ratio of real to fake followers the account has.
Just like any other investments, the purpose of flipping social media accounts is to make money. But also just like any other investments, there are clear winners and clear losers. As a buyer, you want to make sure you’re as educated about your investment as you can be, and though that can take a little bit of legwork to accomplish, it’s worth it in the long run.