This week in Professor Soares’ General Interest Books class, we had stimulating guest speakers from Egmont Books, a European based children’s and YA publisher. We talked about marketing and how publishers target kids through new ways. Social Media is on everyone’s lips as the way to reach new audiences, however laws prohibiting children from using social networking websites make it difficult to use this approach for them.

This confuses me since teen and tween popstars always seem to have the highest number of followers. Justin Bieber, for example, was crowned king of Twitter at one point. If children can’t legally sign up for a Twitter account, how can he have so many online fans? It turns out the majority of them are fake! Check out this info-graphic that ranks popular pop-star’s follower authenticity from Statista.

One cool tool for evaluating followers of certain brands on Twitter (and could generally be applied to other websites comes from Social Bakers, a social media resource website.

How to tell if an account may be fake according to Social Baker:

• The account is following less than 50 people and has less than one follower
• More than 30% of all tweets use spam phrases, such as “diet,” “make money,” and “work from home”
• The same tweets are repeated more than three times, even when posted to different accounts
• More than 90% of the account´s tweets are retweets
• More than 90% of tweets are links and the profile has a following: followers ratio of 7: 1 or more. This means the profile is following 7 users while only being followed by 1.
• The account has never tweeted
• The account is more than two months old and still has a default profile image