ohinalbertxy: Are your Twitter followers fake?

Friday, 24 August 2012

Are your Twitter followers fake?

The size of your Twitter following is an indication of your social media influence.

But your clever musings will have little effect on one type of Twitter user: the spambot.

A new online tool by StatusPeople, a London-based social media management company, tells you how many of your followers are not people, but spam programs, Mashable reports.

Of the 1,000 or so followers of my account, @JamesCincy, 1 percent are probably fake, according to the tool.

About 4 percent of @BusinessCourier?s nearly 10,000 followers are most likely not real.

Some of the city?s largest corporations fared worse. Of the Procter & Gamble Co. (@ProcterGamble) account?s 36,000 followers, 6 percent exist only as lines of code.

Of the 117,000 followers of Macy?s Inc.?s @Macys, 7 percent are spammers, the tool found.

And one of the city?s biggest Twitter accounts, @WritersDigest, with 312,000 followers, is vexed with a 16 percent faker rate.

StatusPeople counts your spambot rate from a sample of your followers.

?On a very basic level spam accounts tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets,? according to the firm. ?But in contrast they tend to follow a lot of other accounts.?

To plug in your Twitter handle and see how you rank, click here.