As regular readers of this blog will know I’m not a fan of the obsession with followers and fans. News broke the other week that Mitt Romney has been boosting his followers on Twitter by seemingly buying lots of fake followers. It really does underline the futility of this obsession with numbers. It’s no better than in the old days of the web when people would go crazy over how many hits they had, hoodwinking the unaware into believing that 1 hit = 1 unique visitor, when of course the reality was so very different.
The problem of crowdturfing is sadly not uncommon though. Research earlier this year found that nearly 50% of the followers on big brand Twitter accounts are in fact fakes.
I’ve said many times that each community you build on the web should have a purpose, whether that’s delivering customer service or soliciting new product ideas. It’s that purpose that underpins your ROI because it directly links into your business. Have x number of followers is completely worthless and therefore its pointless focusing on that as a metric.
Anyway, rant aside, there’s a nice tool created by Status People that lets you analyse your Twitter account to see how many fake followers you have. It breaks down your followership into good, bad and fake. Here’s my score below. Post up your own in the comments section.
Very interesting, Adi
I couldn't work out how to post the image, but my score were "Fake – 0%, Inactive 3%, Good 97%", but then at around 800 followers, I guess I'm way behind Romney!!
Cheers,
Jeff
Good stats Jeff. Of course Romney only has 58% in the good column so you're closer than you think 😉
Not a fan of the follower debate but wrote a blog post about it ;-
What's the url Jonathan?
Fake 1% >> Inactive 4% >> Good 95% based on 1,135 followers. I'll take that!
Quite startling when you use the tool to search other accounts and establish what they're made up of. Don't like to name and shame, but one seemingly reputable account, with a book published on social media and how to grow your follower count has 80% fakers and 8% inactive = shocking!
Ben
Some good stats there Ben. Scary isn't it how some seemingly big accounts are not quite so prestiguous when you look under the hood. I mean even someone like Robert Scoble only scores 56% in the good column.
I proudly declare that of my 99 followers 1% fake, 9% inactive and 90% good!
That's certainly an interesting take on the 90:9:1 rule of online communities Sam 🙂
Of course, association didn’t enter my head! Brilliant! Certainly if flipped on its head would appear that in this case 1% is in fact BS, glad it’s not the other way around… Would make my efforts, however small at this point, redundant, I’m glad to learn I’m doing something right! I’ve made a rule to check out every follower and follow most back, there are a couple I thought might be fake but surprised only 1% in reality. I’m still relatively new to social media, and posts like this are brilliant- I am slowly figuring out where I am. Thanks Adi
Adi, mine are 0% fake, 3% active and 97% good! But I have only 710 followers. Also I'm very stringent in following people back and if they don't meet certain criteria I don't follow them back.
I totally agree that false metrics really don't do anyone any good least of all you, since the fake followers are not going to be interested in your tweets nor are they going to convert into loyal customers nor will you be able to establish any rapport with them. Great idea for a post. Get's everyone interested and anxious tto see how they are faring.
Nice stats Gazalla. Well deserved too.
Adi,
Great post as always!
My Faker Score is taking a while. Maybe we are sending too much traffic to the server! Could you imagine that?
Anyhow, I think connecting with real fans and influencers is more important than scores and follower counts when it comes to your product or service.
cheers,
Pete
Fake: 1%, Inactive: 4%, Good: 95%. Yeah, that sounds about right! Considering I'm at a little more than 2,500 followers and that I was not as thorough with whom I followed in the earlier days (2010-ish), I think this is actually pretty good 😉
Nice one Frederic. I think the app analyses your latest 500 followers to ensure the processing load isn't too great.
Thanks for the post, Adi!
My results :
Fake –>0%
Inactive–>2%
Good–>98%
Pretty happy with that! 🙂
Considering my 12.500 followers, they are nice stats, right?
How many fake Twitter accounts are there in total do you think?
I think you\’d be surprised Andrea. Some estimates suggest as few as 35% of Twitter followers are either real people or active users.
For instance analysis this year of the last 100 million Twitter accounts showed that over 20% of them had never sent a single tweet or followed a single user.
Barack Obama has 18,600,769 followers. 41% of his followers are fake, with juts 24% 'good'
So over 7.5 million fake followers. Incredible isn't it? I hope he has some decent ROI measures in place for his Twitter activity and isn't just counting his followers.
Does "inactive" necessarily mean "fake"?
Not neccessarily, but they\’re not the kind of account follower you want even so.
90% of my followers are ok, so happy enough with that.
Nice one Oliver. Welcome to the blog.
2% fake
4% inactive
94% good
Interesting thought Adi.
You know, I use Manage Flitter to check profile without photos and activity, before I unfollow them. Your thoughts are very novel on this front.
P.S: Check the Top Business Blogs section on my site. If you like what you see, mail me.
Hi, I am 0% fake, 7% inactive and 93% fine.
Is there a way to have the same analysis about the accounts we follow ?
I have a Twitter account for two years now but I think I connected to it only five times. Si the account is not fake but inactive.
Rubbish! I've had enough of reading this crap over and over again, so I created a new account and followed some people who were obviously talking to other people every day. Some of whom followed me back, and I then ran the tool. Oh yes, one fake follower.
Oh did I forget to mention that I followed myself with both of my other accounts? One of which I tweet from almost daily, and the other of which I use to follow some newspaper accounts but never, ever tweet from?
Well I can't prove it but I reckon that the account I use just for reading newspapers and record labels (several times a week) might just be the 'fake' account statuspeople helpfully discovered. I suppose I'd better block it at once, maybe report it to Twitter for being fake. It's obviously dangerous.
Could it be, I wonder, that some people might have followed Obama and Romney during the election? Maybe some of them joined Twitter just for that reason and got bored. Genuinely inactive accounts in those cases (unlike mine) but it hardly proves they've been buying fake follows.
You must know how this lousy tool works. Please blog about something real rather than something just to get hits and consequent advertising revenue. My follow only account has been blocked by several fools I buy music from since Statuspeople arrived on the scene, and I'm fed up with it.
My last three posts have been on urban safety, age discrimination, and designing games for social good. Is that real enough? 🙂
Oh, I see! I'll check back to see if it's been 'approved', then. I wonder if it will be.
You seem kinda mad Peter. Everything ok?
Well, it depends if followers are active or inactive. In general more than 70 percent are inactive users or followers
I think there are lots of 'fakes' out there sadly. Never saw anyone really talk about it though. – thanks. Interesting post.
Unfortunately, I think I have many! I didn’t buy them or anything like that, but the lack of engagement is what troubles me.
It's really funny that many companies and even individuals go for fake followers on twitter just to show how big they are. But infact you are right about genuine followers instead of this fake number game.
Fake Followers do have some impact in twitter's account overall authority, that is the reason why people are after fake followers.
I have a twitter account and I used to have fake followers, but Twitter deleted them all. But ever since I had fake followers more people started to follow me. So I guess what that means is whether you have fake or real followers what matters most is the number.
It appears I have 2% fake & 40% inactive! I’ve never really bothered about the number of followers, it’s more about quality interaction than quantity.