It’s official! According to Twitter and the StatusPeople application, we no longer have fake subscribers on Twitter. 66% are real and active users and 34% are real but inactive. And what about your business?
Is it known by poll numbers and statistics? Twitter is not the preferred network in B2B but, it has an important role to play, especially in event information.
In short, Twitter and a good number of applications that aim to verify subscribers and their accounts, categorize us into three types of users, B2B or not:
- Fake
- Inactive
- Real
Inactive accounts are those who haven’t tweeted for over six months. Here’s an excerpt from the Twitter Help desk:
“To keep your account active, make sure you log in and tweet at least every 6 months. Accounts can be permanently deleted because of their prolonged inactivity”.
They are real but forgotten by their owners. As we can see, Twitter’s patience has its limits too, so, they are in purgatory…
As for the real ones, they go to heaven while the fake ones go to hell, even if they are very active…
What does this change for a B2B business you may wonder?
It changes a lot of things actually.
- All our subscribers are real, so we are more likely to have our content reach potential customers.
- With Tweepsmap for example, we can know who is idle and for how long, then act accordingly.
- Like most platforms, Twitter now promotes content from credible and active sources.
- The credibility in B2B is won with relevant and quality content, with our relationships and above all, our interactions and frequency.
- If you have credible sources that are trusted by Twitter and the users, the more credible you are.
- The more social interactions you have with real influencers in your workplace, the more you show faith in Twitter and your group.
- Twitter is the preferred network for marketing influencers, including B2B
- It’s not the number of subscribers that counts but rather, the quality
- Reliable content shared with other reliable sources is more likely to become viral.
Want an example? Last March, we published for the second consecutive year, our Top 30 marketing influencers. Take a look at the results of this campaign, that is not over yet since we have to publish it again in March of next year.
The Top 30 was written on our blog and aired on our main social media platforms including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. It was recently that the blog went viral…
By the way, the results referenced are partial, since the main tweet continues to get taken and retweeted to this day; hundreds of times a week!
What does it take to have a proper account? A…
- tracking tool, such as Tweepsmap
- validation tool, such as StatusPeople
- big cleaning at the start
- cleaning per week
- The circumstantial help of Twitter
- good dose of judgment
At first, when we made the decision to clean up our account, it was far from clean! We had to eliminate more than 600 accounts of the 1 800 open, so about a third. It wasn’t easy to fall back to 1 200.
In addition, Twitter has recently removed 33 additional accounts. Despite this large clean-up and other weekly maintenance, we now have more qualified subscribers than initially.
How do you know if an account is real or fake? Check:
- Who has a certified account
- The creation date
- Does the account refer to a site or blog
- If the account is only trying to sell or has RT content
- Make sure the photo matches the person’s digital identity elsewhere on the Web
Here’s an example of a well known Quebec politician’s Twitter account in full campaign mode:
The egg heads have disappeared, but the empty heads have not…
There are a lot of fake users named Francois Dessureault, who engage in pornography.
Also, there are a lot of Lynelle Hostan’s, which is spam, trying to sell you thousands of subscribers for $5.
A lot of fake accounts are easy to detect, such as this one found in the followers of a very serious businessmen:
Do you seriously believe that Miss Smith is from Calgary, just registered this month and has no web reference, i.e. website, blog, LinkedIn profile?
Also pay attention to @carolline4576 and @NguynSn75660049 as they are most likely bots.
And last question: how many real subscribers of these six, are found in the account of a Quebec political party leader?
Empty heads and Jo Blo’s… And no, it’s not the @FLegaultCAQ account that only has a tweet and 924 subscribers to its credit.
Because it too is a fake account…
