On Twitter and Facebook it is all about the numbers – here, size COUNTS – the more followers the greater your influence.
Or, is it really so?
Cape Town blog, 2oceansVIBE recently posted this question; “Are SA’s Digital Agencies Buying Fake Twitter Followers For Themselves And Their Clients?” with a link to a service called Status People that allows you to check for fake, good and inactive Twitter accounts.
Now one has to take into account that 2oceansVIBE Radio was recently involved in a stats-related online radio industry debate that showed that most figures put out by online radio stations were vastly inflated. So, it is understandable that they would now become the ‘unofficial watchdog’ for online statistics fakery.
Of course my curiosity got the better of me and off I went to Status People to see what the score for the MyPE Twitter account would be. Whilst there I did a quick score check on our 3 big local radio broadcasters as well.
Here are the quick scores and graphs:
All the numbers are as at 06h00 23 August 2012.
I suspect that the ‘algorithm’ that Status People use to determine ‘fake’ followers may be a function of how many followers one has as the reported ‘fake’ followers increase the more followers each of the above has.
The above graph is based on these figures:
Tweets and follow numbers:
- MyPE – 12947 Tweets, Following 0 and with 1 764 Followers
- BayFM – 263 Tweets, Following 937 and with 735 Followers
- Algoa FM – 2392 Tweets, Following 80 and with 3 487 Followers
- KingfisherFMnmb – 527 Tweets, Following 108 and with 252 Followers
Estimated ‘fake’ followers:
- BayFM – 2% (15)
- KingfisherFMnmb – 3% (8)
- MyPE – 6% (106)
- AlgoaFM – 16% (558)
Estimated ‘inactive’ followers:
- KingfisherFMnmb – 19% (48)
- BayFM – 26% (192)
- MyPE – 32% (564)
- AlgoaFM – 41% (1430)
Estimated ‘good’ followers:
- AlgoaFM – 43% (1499)
- MyPE – 62% (1094)
- BayFM – 72% (529)
- KingfisherFMnmb – 78% (197)
Follower Weight (Number of Followers/Number of people followed):
- AlgoaFM – 43.58
- MyPE – 1764 (can’t divided by 0 so had to say 1 follower)
- KingfisherFMnmb – 2.33
- BayFM – 0.78
The MyPE Twitter Account Faker Score as at 23 August 2012.
