Lady Gaga has almost 30 million, Wayne Rooney nearly five million and David Cameron a more-than-respectable two million plus. But how many of their Twitter followers actually exist?
A British start-up company has pledged to root out and expose the phantom, fake and fraudulent followers being used to massage the numbers claimed by celebrities, politicians and the merely insecure within the Twittersphere.
It used to be that the number of an individual's Facebook friends was a measure of value in the social media era, but that source of prestige has been supplanted by the Twitter index. The number of followers of an individual Twitter account is seen as a measure of influence that can be translated into financial value by advertisers and marketing companies. Before the Olympics began, many British athletes were encouraged to tweet about products such as cars they had received from sponsors.
The company, Status People, has now devised a software tool that divides followers into the fake, the inactive and the good. Company executive Rob Waller said it had been decided to create the "fake follower" tool after reports that former Tory MP Louise Mensch had 40,000 fake followers. The fake follower tool aims to expose the true extent of the problem of phantom Twitter followers.
Source: The Guardian
