There has been a lot of news lately about Obama’s percentage of fake Twitter followers. Apparently 70% of his followers are not real users.
I don’t buy this. As we highlighted last week in How to Use Twitter as a News Source, many people use Twitter as a sort of RSS feed of people, companies, and news organizations they would like to follow. It is my understanding from these fake follower checkers that they look at how many of your Twitter follows are not active and if the ratio of following to followers is largely skewed to the following side. If you set up your Twitter account to just be a feed, then you will be counted as a fake follower because you are inactive and are following a ton of people without having followers in return. But you might be anything but a fake follower. You may be watching every word said by a particular person, company, or news organization and instead of re-tweeting those comments or even tweeting about the comments, you might be blogging or writing about what you see on Twitter on other platforms.
Here is the definition of a fake follower on the Status People website:
On a very basic level spam accounts tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets. But in contrast they tend to follow a lot of other accounts.
If you would like to see how many of your followers are fake, inactive, or active, go to this link:
http://fakers.statuspeople.com/Fakers
Here is the faker score for EPR Creations:
Hey, I beat Obama by a lot.
