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Spotting fake followers on twitter isnt as easy as you think
March 28th, 2009Just read this post about how to spot people with fake follower counts on twitter.
Interesting article but as usual the boy scout brigade arent thinking it through.
Its not as easy as they make out, to illustrate that let me show you three graphs from twittercounter then ask you to guess which is faked…
I know these stats because I am in control of all three accounts here (and many more hehe)
OK now 1 of those is real… but its not necessarily the one you think…
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4 Responses to “Spotting fake followers on twitter isnt as easy as you think”
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Hi my name is Paul Madden and I am a UK SEO based in Lancashire, for years I have been cursed by the nickname SEOidiot which started life as a form of abuse from someone but you need to decide for yourself how accurate the term is.
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Very interesting response. Thanks for taking time to write this.
I think if you look at the details of my original post you will notice that a twittercounter graph was only the starting point for analysis. Yes, follow history is a significant marker, but the accounts I looked at (and graphed) were also examined by looking at the activity of the account such as content, # tweets, RTs, publicity, links in, SEO etc.
As I stated, there are always exceptions to the rule, and spikes can be attributed to other causes, but my point is that huge spikes are unusual on most accounts but when they do exist for genuine reasons they can normally be explained by looking deeper into the account activity.
Unfortunatley I would not attempt to conclude which of the above is fake and real because you have not provided the names of the accounts. There are various tools such as Trendrr which allow the monitoring of following ratios etc making it an easier catch provided you know the actual twitter account name.
Cheers and appreciate the trackback.
@eunmac (aka the boy scout brigade)
All points taken no offense meant
Many of those spouting about this don’t know what they are on about though
I would say that the first one is fake, the immediate spike is strange…
@nadir – nope
@eunmac – i did think that yours was a well written and informative piece but i do think that people assume its easier than it really is to spot the fakes
and it is very easy to fake, i do it to build eyeballs for clients in the early days of a brand…