How to Avoid Fake/Spam FB Followers

If you notice that a Facebook page for a community you are managing has a high ratio of international followers, there’s a good chance these followers were “bought” to inflate the number of page likes and are likely spam. It’s a good idea to check on your location demographics when you’re pulling reporting - it’s pretty easy to know when something’s wonky. Here is how to view the breakdown of location demographics for your Facebook followers:

1. Go to the FB page as normal.

2. At the top, click on “Insights”

3. On the left, click “People”

4. You will see an age, gender and location breakdown of the demographics of your page’s followers. This is Rolling Green Village — notice how most follower are ages 45+ but there is some distribution across age groups, which is normal. Ideally, your follower base would favor ages 55+. In terms of location, the vast majority of the followers are located in the USA, and even better, in South Carolina, where RGVG is located. This is considered ideal.

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Conversely, this is the current following demographic breakdown for John Knox Village of Central Florida. The red flags to note are: 

1. Majority of followers are located in Egypt and other middle-eastern countries

2. Majority of followers are ages 18-24

3. Majority of followers speak Arabic

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Why is this a problem? 

Although having 1,000+ page likes looks good on paper, according to Social Media Examiner, when Facebook detects spammy comments on your Page or likes from fake Facebook accounts (whether purchased or not), they remove your Page updates from the news feed. You end up losing a significant part (if not all) of your reach and engagement.

What can we do to resolve/remove fake or spam followers?

Removing fake accounts is actually the easy part (sort of). Here’s how to look at your follower list and remove followers from your list. 

1. Go to your Page

2. Click on “Settings”

3. On the left, click “People and other pages”

4. You’ll see the list of everyone who follows your page, sorted by when they followed, with the most recent being at the top.

5. It’s pretty easy/intuitive to detect fake or spam followers. You can hover over the name to get a little bit of info, and sometimes it’s really easy to spot fakes by this alone. You can also click on the name to see their full profile. These are some factors or “red flags” to consider when combing through the list.

   1. Location - is it outside of the U.S.?

   2. Number of friends - is it suspiciously low? 

   3. Profile content - are there only one or two posts? Is there inappropriate content? 

   4. Name - is it foreign or in another language?

6. If you’ve determined that a follower should indeed be removed from the list, simply check the box next to their name, click on the settings icon (small gear) and choose “remove from page likes”

Examples of followers that should be removed: 

What can be done to prevent this moving forward?

You can help protect your page from this type of activity by restricting access to certain countries. Since most (if not all?) of our communities are based in the U.S., it would make sense to limit visibility of the page to people who live in the U.S. only. To do this:

1. Go to your page and click “Settings”

2. Under General, click on “edit” for “country restrictions”

3. Type in “United States” and select “Only show this Page to viewers in these countries”

4. Save changes