How Fake Are Your Twitter Followers?
August 27, 2012
Ever wonder about celebrities, politicians and others who have huge numbers following them on Twitter? How do they amass those big numbers – those millions of followers?
I used to think about it occasionally. Not that I was jealous.
That was before I rocketed up to 10 followers. And held steady there for three straight years … before declining slightly (into negative numbers).
I was curious about the cause though. I saw some unknown, unpublished, zero-selling authors (unlike me. I’ve sold one book – to my grandmother’s estate) with more than 100,000 Twitter followers. With that many followers I assumed they had to be delivering great content, insights and inspirational stories on a consistent basis. Problem is … they weren’t.
SIZE DOES COUNT
Why would follower counts matter? Credibility and status mostly. You’re perceived as a credible, valuable and trusted source if a lot of people follow you. That credibility and status can be leveraged as a platform to promote your business or yourself. It’s what’s exceptional about social media -the ability to talk directly to your potential customers and buyers – without having to buy advertising or beg the media to write about you . It’s extraordinary … if the people are real.
I could be wrong, but I’m fairly certain fakers don’t buy a lot of stuff – unless they have a government job.
But like I said, I’m not jealous, I just wanted to know the cause.
THE WIZARD OF COZ
The curtain is being pulled back on the cause of some of those astronomical following numbers. A free tool called StatusPeople is revealing some big-time fakes and fakers. What StatusPeople purports to do is analyze your twitter profile through a set of spam criteria and determine (approximately) your number of fake and inactive followers.
SO WHAT’S A CLUELESS NON-FAKER TO DO?
So, how fake are your followers? Here’s how to find out.
- Sign in to your Twitter account.
- Go to Fakers StatusPeople
- Click on the ‘Connect to Twitter” image
- When you see this message, “authorize StatusPeople Fake Followers to use your account?,” Click the “Authorize App.”
HOW FAKE ARE YOU?
Status People then pulls back the curtains and reveals how many fake and inactive users you have.
HOW FAKE ARE THEY?
When you’re finished running your profile you can then type other profiles in to see how many fake and inactive followers others have.
SURPRISE
Here’s a couple surprises. I’m not going to say Barack Obama, Mitt Romney or even Lady Gaga. Surely they’ll be working on cleaning up their fakers by now. But how about …
FAKE TWITTER FOLLOWERS OF TWITTER?
Twitter.com has 80% fake or inactive followers. That’s presidential.
CNN Breaking – 73% fake or inactive.
FoxNews – 73% fake or ianctive
Justin Bieber – 71% fake or inactive.
Time Magazine – 71% fake or ianctive.
And the list goes on and on and on. Try it for yourself.
The question is, how did the fakers get there? And, if you do have a high faker count, how do you clean them up?
I’d use ManageFlitter (@manageflitter) to help clean up the inactives. But how to identify who the fakes are, and clean them up? Maybe @statuspeople will add that offering to their app.
Steve Kayser is an experienced PR & Media Relations Director, radio host and an award-winning business writer. His unique (some say bizarre) approach to PR, Marketing and Media Relations has been documented in a marketing best practices case study by MarketingSherpa, profiled as a “Purple Cow,” by author Seth Godin, and featured in the best-selling books, The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott and "Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs" by Craig Stull, Phil Myers, and David Meerman Scott.
Steve has also been featured in the following publications: A Marketer’s Guide to e-Newsletter Publishing, Credibility Branding, Innovation Quarterly, B2B Marketing Trends, PRWEEK, Faces of E-Content, and The Ragan Report. Steve's writings have appeared in Corporate Finance Magazine, CEO Refresher, Entrepreneur Magazine, Business 2.0, and Fast Company Magazine – among many others.. Google+
Connect
Interesting story about this. A few weeks back when the StatusPeople app started popping up on the radar, I very innocently shared it all over the place. One guy on LinkedIn who I just started working with on a project became extremely pissed. He felt that I was targeting him for some reason. When I explained my reasoning for sharing he began to explain to me how he was a one man show, and couldn’t possibly handle all of his client’s social profiles. “They want numbers, and I give them numbers” he said. I was completely blown away. He continued to give me a long speech about burning bridges, creating enemies, and such. He booted me out of everything we were working on, revoking all of my administrative roles. Then mysteriously I began having problems with my Twitter account the next day. That’s because my followers of @amishroadshow went from 181 to 12,000+, overnight! I can’t prove it was him of course, but I have my suspicions. It could have been any number of people trying to discredit me for putting them on front street. It still blows my mind. I looked it up on ebay afterwards and found that 10,000 followers can be purchased for as little as $5. Makes me wonder if this is going to be a new way to discredit people for only a few dollars. I wish people would cut the bull crap, and just be social. Fortunately for me Twitter is slowely weeding out the fake profiles. It’s now down to around 5,000.
Hey Seth! Thanks for the comment. I don’t know how I missed this. But thanks for taking time to comment. Wild story. A bunch of butt-faces on twitter for sure. I was fairly early on Twitter and it had devolved into the Fakers/big counts. And the news media is as ripe as anyone.
Nice to meet you.
Steve