Barack Obama has more than 18 million of them. But Lady Gaga has 11 million more. What Obama and Gaga have in common is millions of Fake Followers on Twitter. And as Joe Biden might say, but more colorfully, it’s a really big deal.
Consider that Twitter is based on the idea of real people, filing real opinions, in real time. The social media’s best use came during the Iranian people’s uprising in 2009, when citizens of a captive nation tweeted to let the world know what was going on in their closed society. Powerful stuff.
And Twitter has become a popular address for celebrities to chime in on news of the day, or keep fans up to date on their latest nuptials or divorce.
The idea is personal, brief, real time.
Now consider that 70 percent of Obama’s followers are fake, as are an equal percent of Gaga, and Tweetland is wondering just who is talking to whom anyway? If followers can be generated, it’s reasonable to think that the tweets themselves could be generated by computer, using keywords and surrounding verbiage.
Twitterville has something of a social media disease on its hands.
According to a recent piece in the New York Times, “The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have,” the Times reports.
“Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers,” said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. “We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake.”
Brand builders take note: we have now reached the stage where you really can rent your own personal fan club on the cheap. Whether tweet pollution can and should be dealt with is debatable. On one hand, if Twitter allows fake followers to flourish, consumers–already cynical for any number of reasons–will automatically deduct from Twitter some measure of its wonder. But on the other, what really is the value of one more probably useless assertion of purity in the world. It’s easier to assume that Twitter has some fakes, as barrels have bad apples, and move on.
The potential trouble for Twittertown is that the service might be seen as a contradiction of everything it’s supposed to stand for. The best tweets are spontaneous utterances, though it’s possible that the event itself and the reaction to it can be planned in advance.
Perhaps Twitter can institute some sort of verification system to assure that followers or posters are real people–see the comments sections of newspaper Websites which are now run through Facebook.
Identity is still a touchy matter on the Internet. We would like as much access to information as possible, but would like to be perched behind a digital cloak of privacy while we’re digging.
Check Out our GoPromotional Twitter Page to see what a REAL Twitter profile should look like!
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