A free new tool from @statuspeople shows how many of your followers are fake or to put it another way how many are spammers. Spam accounts could have followed you in the hope that they’ll be able to spam you with direct messages should you follow them back. Followers could also have been bought; a counter productive activity but one that’s increasing.
After connecting to your Twitter account, Fake Follower Check will analyse your followers and display number of fake followers, number of inactive followers and number of good followers.
The tool has a certain curiosity value but has two important business benefits:
1) It’s important for you to know that your followers are legitimate and active so you can engage them in conversation and provide them with valuable content. You also want them to be active so they can retweet your content.
2) It’s useful for checking the authenticity of a Twitter account and by extension the person behind so can be used as a ‘red flag indicator’. A high percentage of fake followers could indicate that followers have been purchased. Try running the tool against a few politicians, celebrities and social media consultants. If the results are interesting let me know the results in the comments below.
Checking the tool’s results against other analytical tools confirms that results are reasonably accurate although there were one or two anomalies. However, a sample of up to 1000 followers is used so results for those with above 1000 followers won’t be as accurate as those with less than a 1000.
@statuspeople are now working on integrating Fake Follower Check into their main tool and creating a fake follower removal tool.