How Fake Are Your Twitter Followers?

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 I saw some unknown, unpublished, zero-selling authors (unlike me.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.

1. Sign in to your Twitter account.
2. Go to Fakers StatusPeople
3. Click on the ‘Connect to Twitter” image
4. 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.