I have to admit it, I don’t rely understand Social meejah. I have the obligatory Facebook and Twitter accounts but the number of my Followers remains steadfastly at a level that they were when I pretty much set up the wretched things.

Fans of these forms of digitised social interaction seem fixated on statistics, particularly on numbers of followers and or so-called friends. They will go to enormous lengths to boost them, thus increasing the chances of their latest inanities trending, as I think the term is. The thinking is that success begets success and the more followers you have the more likely your fan club is to grow exponentially.

One company called Devumi, I read this week, buys and sells fake followers so that those who subscribe to their services appear to be more influential than they really are. For just $17 you can generate a thousand followers and they claim to have at least 3.5 million automated accounts to offer.

If you are going to use them, you had better move sharpish. Allegations have surfaced that this is a fraud, that their address in Manhattan is a fake and that the founder’s LinkedIn career summary is somewhat questionable. The New York prosecutor is investigating Devumi as I write.

It was only in November that Facebook revealed that as many as 60 million of its accounts are generated by automated bots. Not all is at it seems in the digital world, it would appear.

And there was me thinking that it was going to be the brilliance of my apercus that would see my numbers soaring into the stratosphere. A man can dream!