Facebook announces fake users

So what’s in the numbers. We’re constantly hearing about people buying fake followers on most of the social networks, you can head on over to the likes of http://fiverr.com/ and for you guessed it a fiver you’ll end up with someone getting you a load of new followers. Of course if you don’t know any better then having 20,000 followers looks great but once you realise that these followers don’t do much if anything for you you start to go oh!.

If you’ve a small core group of followers for your business and they interact you’ll find you grow organically.

So it comes as no major shock I would guess that Facebook has now revealed it “believes” there are 83 million fake users on the social network. (Hell I know I’ve got a test account somewhere does that count as fake?) Of course when you’ve got 955 million active users you’ll have to expect that one or two of them are fake. Add in the amount of people who’s pets have accounts and the amount of agencies running extra accounts and so on is it really surprising that nearly 9% of their accounts are fake? (I’m unsure if those are counted in there)

Given the pummeling that FaceBook is taking on NASDAQ I can’t see this helping them out at all. They’re down to around $21 now having launched for $38 back in May so if you’d invested €1000 you’d now have around 550€ now. Can we expect things to keep on dropping? Given more people are using mobile devices for Facebook and they don’t exactly have a stellar record with generating revenue across their mobile user base I think we may see them dropping further.

You can read move over on the Technology section on the BBC website.