Fakes are fakes. Easy to spot. Still, we often get trapped and connect with unwanted bugs on social media. Also, we are talking about real people whose Facebook account and profile seems to be fake even there is a gem of a person behind it. Let’s have a look at some signs that spoil one’s social media impression and influence.
1. Mutual friends can deceive
Checking out mutual friends should be your last quality profile check. Today’s fake profile are coming up so real that even smartest of social users may be fooled. This guy is a common friend with some of the authority people on Facebook I am connected with, sadly.
2. Don’t go with profile picture
Most of the fake profile pictures will be just too awesome, pretty and stylish to believe. Try checking the consistency of the same face in the timeline posts.
3. Facebook cover is a catch
If the Facebook cover is unrealistic and directionless which doesn’t give an idea of the person’s personality, you may want to check out a lot of other things on profile to gauze the genuineness of a person. No cover photo is better than a meaningless cover photo.
4. See what the timeline is speaking
The time line of a person acts as the online persona and reputation meter of a person. Whatever is shared, tagged and posted reflects what and who you are. If the timelines is carrying all the lovey dovey strange posts by the person or their friends without any sensible conversations, it’d be better to stay away from such accounts.
5. Who are their friends?
If you find only either all same or opposite gender people with cheesy profile pictures at first sight of their friends, steer clear. A genuine profile will have a good mix of people and profiles.
6. What their “About” section says?
Or does it say anything at all? Most of the fake accounts wouldn’t bother to write about them.
7. What kind of photos they add & get tagged
This is interesting. Most of such profiles will have selfies and profile pictures update every other day. They would share others’ selfies and pictures with equal interest.
Knowing these signs, you would spot some of such active or dead profiles on a quick scan of your connections.
But…
If you don’t add them, how do they still manage to see you and like your updates?
Thanks to “Follow” feature.
What to do about it?
For global professionals, consultants like me and other public figures, it’s unrealistic to keep a closed profile when social media is the mainstream business. We just need to tackle some people and ignore some while filtering the set of people we want to connect to. If you’re using Facebook and social networks for purely personal reasons, it’s better to keep certain privacy settings on. These precautions should help…
- Only friends can view what all is shared on profile
- Remove those who show early signs of desperation or non-sense
- Keep chat turned off, mostly
- Only friends or friends of friends can email
- Disallow the social network’s search engine index your profile
- Control how people see your timeline
- Control & moderate tagging
- Who can post on your timeline
Do you have more ideas to keep a clean social media presence? Would love to see your thoughts.
Sunita Biddu is a digital business coach and power blogging mentor helping coaches and small business owners. She helps with building a strong and profitable online presence and reputation that creates a self-sustaining business. Sunita writes on this blog once a week about easy-to-use guides and articles about business, coaching, social media and blogging. You can grab some of her free resources and ebooks from the resources section.