In this influence economy that affects consumer behaviors, even social media influencers, content creators and small business owners employ bots.

This is driven by the desire to have an attractive number of followers or a cleverly worded surface response that translates to more clients, sponsorships and engagements. After all, big brands and customers prefer to work with established businesses and influencers with a huge amount of following across their name.

However, a huge following does not mean organic engagement. Most of these social media bots pose as real users but only ever comment to propagate ideas and promote products or services. Thus, they do not provide genuine interaction.

What Are Social Media Bots?

With the increase in users of social media networking sites comes the influx of bots.

Social media bots are automated bots utilized to perform and mimic human-like functions on social media.

These functions include spreading information and interacting with other social media users, especially on Instagram and Twitter.

What Are the Numbers?

So, how many accounts on social media are bots? There is no exact number. Due to errors in estimation and the complexity of programs used to create bots, researchers and experts say it is tough to say for sure. However, various data provides us with close estimates.

Let’s take a look at the following social media networking sites and their estimated number of bots:

Facebook and Twitter

Social media giants Facebook and Twitter are known for having mechanisms to detect fake accounts or bots, flag them, and subsequently have them removed.

However, according to these companies, blocking handmade bots prove more difficult. These fake accounts are not created by system programs but by real people typing on their computers or phones.

From January to September 2020, Facebook blocked 4.5 billion accounts from their platform. However, by the end of the year, Facebook’s estimates say that more than 90 million accounts or 5% of its profiles are fake.

On the other hand, researchers estimate that 30 to 50 million, or 9% to 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots. They say that this estimate is conservative, taking into account errors in the model and difficulty in tagging complex bots.

Instagram

Instagram, a network also developed and owned by Facebook, is currently the second most logged-in social networking site. It is an easy-to-use photo and video sharing app where you can opt to have a personal profile or a business profile. With its 1 billion user base as of October 2020, it is becoming a haven for content creators, brands and even small businesses.

However, for the same reason, Instagram’s bot problem is becoming increasingly complicated. A study has shown that one in ten Instagram accounts is fake. This figure translates to around 95 million bot accounts on the platform, an unsurprising number for a website as large as Instagram. Nevertheless, it is still alarming.

LinkedIn

Smaller social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Reddit are not exempted from having bot problems. However, the numbers are considerably less.

LinkedIn said that between January and June 2019, they flagged around 22 million fake accounts. Of this figure, 95% were stopped from registration, meaning they were not even able to access the site.

As a platform for professionals, it is more tricky to have bots and fake accounts on LinkedIn. For this reason, the company is committed to continuously working to avoid further scams by improving its systems.

Pinterest

With its virtual pinboard to source inspiration on various ideas, Pinterest aims to peg itself as something more than just a social networking site. Nevertheless, they still have bot problems.

In their fake profile purge, Pinterest deleted millions of fake accounts using the website to spread misinformation or sell various products through affiliate links. In that purge, around 20% of the followers of the then-top ten users were tagged as fake accounts.

Reddit

Reddit, a discussion website, was the sixth most popular social networking application in the United States in 2019. Worldwide, it is the 11 most used social platform.

Having more than 130,000 active communities and over 2 million subreddits on varying topics, Reddit is a place that focuses on user engagements. For this reason, most Reddit users do not tolerate promotional content; they flag these posts as spam.

What are bots? Read ”What Are Bots on Social Media?” to learn more.