Recent revelations of fake Facebook and fake Twitter accounts have created a market for a free Twitter follower verification service called Fake Follower Check.
Created by a firm called StatusPeople, the service samples your Twitter account to scan a your followers. Then, it tells what percentage of your followers are good, inactive, or fake. For my account, it informed me that 64% of the accounts were good, 32% inactive, and 4% fake.
You can also get results for other Twitter accounts. Just plug in the name of the account, and the Fake Follower Check will show the percentages. For example, a spot check on Jan 2, 2013 of The NBC Today Show showed 19% of followers may be fake.
How does StatusPeople arrive at their results?
The company samples up to 500 follower accounts, depending on how popular your Twitter account is. It then determines which ones may be spam accounts based on certain criteria. Accounts that have few or no followers and few or no tweets are considered suspect. Spammers also tend to follow a huge number of other accounts.
In an August 14, 2012 review of Fake Follower Check, CNET asked “How accurate is the Fake Follower Check? It’s hard to determine without comparing its results against those of a comparable service. And currently there aren’t any comparable services.
StatusPeople reports that Twitter users with 10,000 or fewer followers will get a ‘very accurate insight’ into how many inactive and fake followers they have.”
StatusPeople offers a spam removal tool for $8.99 per month for up to 5 Twitter accounts, which helps you track down and remove any followers that you discover are fake.
Do you have a Twitter account? How many of your followers are fake?
