In this day and age, it’s not hard to find out how to buy followers for Twitter pages. Simply type this in to Google and there will be hundreds, if not thousands, waiting to collect your money to instantly give you the ‘popularity’ that you want.
But why?
To make yourself look better or more popular? We have all seen “Get Rich Quick schemes” and this is a social media version of doing this for your following.
Recent reports and Twitter apps have even gone a step further to “expose” politicians, musicians, athletes, and other Twitter accounts to show the amount of fake, inactive, and active users of any page.
The New York Times and others have reported some of these surprising, yet maybe not so surprising statistics of the quality of a Twitter account’s followers. A London social media management agency, StatusPeople, went a step farther to determine some numbers more accurately.
The website shows that out of President Barack Obama’s almost 19 million followers, that
31% are fake and another 39% are inactive users totalling about 13 million people that fall in this category. Republican Presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, has over 901,000 followers with 16% fake and 31% are inactive. Obama outnumbers Romney 6 to 1 for ‘fake’ followers.
In a time where the national election is just around the corner, these numbers are now drawing attention. At a time when voters are looking to candidates to believe in, “fake”/bought followers are not a good thing.
Musicians, athletes, and sports leagues also have been exposed in a reports from TechCrunch and Mashable.
Lady Gaga, has roughly 27% of her 28.7 million as fake. World soccer star, Ronaldo, has the most followers of any athlete with 12.6 million. But with the tool that StatusPeople created, 40% of his followers show up as fake, with 39% inactive… dropping his adjusted number down to about 2.6 million ‘real’ followers.
FC Barcelona’s Twitter page has 6.5 million followers with 43% fake and 37% inactive. NBA personalities, Shaq and LeBron James also had a high amount with Shaq’s at 21% fake/47% inactive and LeBron at 24% fake/40% inactive. The NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL also had a large amount of fake and inactive followers to their pages.
This definitely takes away the “WOW” factor when seeing a huge amount of followers now on Twitter… maybe for you too?
Let us know what you think of these numbers on our Facebook, Google+ or Twitter pages.
Swish Digital: SEO Marketing Agency, Social Media