How much is a social media follower worth?

This questions has and continues to confound many entrepreneurs, especially those who are scrambling to find the magical formula to measure the value of social media to their businesses.

Some businesses and brands can get nervous watching competitors’ social media followings grow while theirs stay stagnant. Instead of putting the energy and resources into social media campaigns, however, these entrepreneurs look to "fake fans" to inflate their social media profiles.

The problem is that fake fans can do more harm than good to a business.

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These fake fans come from "click farms," located around the world, mostly in Asia. These businesses hire hundreds of workers for minimal pay and provide them the tools to "follow" brands on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media accounts throughout the day. All of the accounts are fake and many put little to no effort to even appear real.

If you conduct a Google search for fake fans, you will find numerous websites that offer social media fans available for purchase, sometimes as cheap as $4 for 1,000.

Some offers for fake fans even come with a warranty.

Not all cases are for vanity purposes. In some cases, an entrepreneur may elect to buy a handful of fake fans for a newly formed account to quickly pump up the company's social media fan base and create an impression, albeit false, that the business or brand is established, seasoned and popular. The hope is to create a bandwagon effect to attract real fans to join.

Regardless of the reason, adding fake fans can hurt your brand. Here are three potentially harmful effects they can have on your company.

1. Fake fans will dilute the experience of your real fans.

Customer engagement is a critical part of a successful and sustainable social media strategy. Regularly engaging with your fans, sometimes on an individual level, is what consumer expect these days.

When your social media accounts are filled with fake fans, it is incredible difficult to genuinely engage with your real fans through all the noise. More important, your real fans may feel overwhelmed and less significant in a profile of tens of thousands of other fans and ultimately opt to disengage altogether.

2. Fake fans dilute the value of your marketing data.

The search algorithms at Google and Facebook are smart. Love or hate it, they know what you like and who you follow, and they monitor the online interactions you are having with everyone.

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These algorithms also monitor the interactions everyone is having with you. If the majority of your followers on social media (not just in quantity but also in ratio) are fake, then the marketing data your business generates will be skewed and irrelevant.