Twitter’s Dirty Little Secret

By Michael Ogden, CUNA Mutual Group

I’m terrible at keeping secrets and I’m an awful liar. For instance, I believe I’m a better cook than my mother. I love you mom, but it’s true!

Here’s one dirty little secret about your twitter followers: a good portion of your followers could be and probably are fake.

According to a report filed by TechCrunch, 30 percent of the followers on President Barack Obama’s official Twitter feed are fake. That’s about six million of his 19 million followers. Lady Gaga, the most followed person on Twitter: 27 percent fake!

If you’re ever interested in a reality check and finding out just how many of your followers are fake, check out Status People. It’s a free Web application that can show you if your Twitter followers are fake, inactive or good.

Until recently, 19 percent of our followers on @CUNAMutualGroup were fake followers. But after several hours of mining our followers and un-following several people, I’ve made some significant headway.

Because I share everything, here are the official stats of @CUNAMutualGroup’s 2043 followers:

  • 3 percent fake
  • 16 percent inactive
  • 81 percent good

Sure, we are aiming for 100 percent “good” followers. But right now, I’m pretty darn pleased to make that kind of improvement.

The questions are why and how does this happen? You’re probably thinking: “We’re just a credit union in (insert state here). Why would we have fake people following us?

The answers to the “Why?” question: there are plenty of people online looking to hack into your personal account information. The other answer – people pay for followers all of the time to beef up their accounts to impress executives (FYI, we don’t do that).

The answer to the “How?” question: see “pay for followers” answer above.

This “paid followers” approach should raise some serious ethical questions if your organization takes part in it. I’m not one to judge, but I am one to call “shenanigans” when I see it. Luckily, from the social media research I’ve done of the credit union industry, we appear to be pretty clean in our social media practices. That’s a huge relief!

We all have skeletons in our closet….some more than others. It’s still early in the year, so why not make it a priority to do some research and clean out your fake followers? It’s going to take some time. But if you do that, you’re Twitter feed and profile will be clean – and then no more dirty little secrets.

Michael Ogden

Michael Ogden

Michael has been in the social media business for more than a decade inside the credit union, technology, financial and food industries. He’s the founder of For3, LLC, which ... Web: www.for3forgood.com Details