Flip side, it's realllly easy to tell when businesses hire botnets to push up their follower count in hopes of being verified. If an account has tens-hundreds of thousands of followers and no interactions from them, save to assume its all faked. Whats sad is twitter seems to verify them without actually looking.
But how can you tell if the bots are actually hired by the company? What if it was someone outside the company trying to influence Twitter for their own purposes?
Well, botnets and incentivized users are hard to tell apart. Incentivized users often appear to be bots, as their sole purpose for using Twitter is to get something from companies that want the numbers, and they often don't even bother setting a profile photo, or doing anything but retweet promotions.
