Social media advertising has never been bigger. Many celebrities are being paid just to tweet about a product to their millions of followers. However, how many of those followers, friends, etc, are actually real people? Social media expert weighs in on this marketing trend.

1. Does It Pay to Have
Fake Friends on
Social Media?

2. Getting Paid to Tweet
• It pays to have a lot of followers.
• Companies will pay celebrities a lot of money
to mention their products in a tweet.
• The more followers you have, the more you
can command per tweet.
• For example, Frankie Muniz has over 175,000
followers and gets paid $252 a tweet. Kim
Kardashian, on the other hand, with over 25
million followers gets $20,000.

3. Are These Numbers Inflated?
• According to Ken Wisnefski, social media expert,
many celebrities may have more fake followers
than expected.
• In an experiment, a colleague of Wisnefski’s paid
$250 for the promise of 10,000 new followers.
• After he attained the new followers, he analyzed
them to see whether they were real or not. He
discovered that about half were in fact real.

4. Social Media Crackdown
(Instagram Purge)

5. Should Celebrities Stop Paying for
Friends
• According to Ken Wisnefski, this will depend on
external factors.
• Will companies continue to pay so much money
for celebrities to talk about their products on
social media?
• Will more purges occur to the extent of the
Instagram purge?
• Until we know, celebrities should sit tight and see
where the social media landscape takes them.