I'm sure you have read in a number of my blogs before today about numbers on social media, those follower numbers, the magic follower count. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn connections and Instagram fans, they're all numbers to be proud of but there are quite a few fake ones out there.
So if you can tell some porky's (lies) with your follower numbers, surely we can filter the legitimate numbers from the bullshit somehow? Yes we can! Numbers that you can't embellish or purchase are that of conversation numbers, how many replies are there on a persons tweets, as well as looking at the likes and shares.
There is one number I love looking at on Twitter and Facebook and that is video views, most platforms count video views with only 3 - 5 seconds of playback. (doesn't count if the video starts and you scroll past too quick) With this pretty strict playback counter and the fact that the view count is for anyone to see; it's interesting when accounts of 5k, 10k or 66k on Twitter have only 5 - 10 video views? Or less sometimes!! Yikes!!!
Something doesn't add up there does it? But if the majority of their followers are either robots or just accounts where nobody takes in any of the feed and just posts, there's no real benefit in their big follower list. Nothing wrong with this of course but, when some of these accounts sell retweets and shares to their "network" that's when it grinds my gears.
Take a look at it yourself today on twitter, look at any "big" account on twitter and see how many video views they have, 10? 20? or less?