Recently there has been a lot of articles being written about how to assess the quality of your followers, especially with the article from Mashable citing that the main @Twitter account likely has almost 33% of its followers potentially being spam bots and “fake” followers.
I find this really interesting and have started wondering to myself what the Fake Follower trend would be if you compared individuals’ accounts vs. brands’ accounts…who would have more fake followers more often? I used the StatusPeople tool mentioned in the article to check how many of my Twitter followers were fake, thinking that it might be some huge number because would 768 people (As of September 2012) really find what I have to say interesting? As it turns out, maybe! I only had 1% of my followers as potential “fakers” with almost 95% of my followers being “good”. What a pleasant surprise! Long story short, it will definitely be something to keep an eye on in terms of how organizations start dealing with spam bots and fake followers and what organizations like the IAB might do to help control this sort of spam.
Write-up by Mashable with more details on this here – http://mashable.com/2012/08/22/twitter-facebook-fake-followers/