Fake Followers on Twitter

I mentioned fake followers while discussing 新浪微博(sina mini-blog)，a mini-blog service in China, and I recently realized that there are also many fake followers on Twitter, you can buy 5000 followers with $20. However, those followers will not interact with you, will not reply or retweet any of your tweets, they are only a fancy number displayed on the right side bar of your screen.

I think you have to distinguish between real followers and fake followers (maybe Twitter could start a Verified Follower service), and how engaged those followers are. Do they retweet a lot and engage in conversation, or never tune in at all? Follower counts don’t tell you that. Just as all Website visitors are not worth the same, neither are all Twitter followers. But you can’t buy real followers. They come to you.

As I have described, the significant difference between fake followers on Twitter and sina mini-blog is, sina itself is generating these fake users. However, I have no evidence, my conclusion is drawn on the following observations:

1. Almost every time, right after I post a message, I will have a new "follower". If the follower is a human user, he/she shouldn't follow me right after my message is posted. The natural scenery for a real user is: he/she sees my message somewhere, and spend a couple of minutes discovering what else I have posted and decided whether to follow me or not.
2. Most of the fake users are following EXACTLY 30 people.
3. The users are from the same region as the region listed in my profile. I changed my location several times, and so the location of the fake followers.
4. Most of them do not a profile picture nor posted a single message.

In a recent study of RJMetrics, research shows some surprising statistic:

about 25% of accounts have no followers and about 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet. Also, "About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times" and "Only about 17% of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low."

Even think about people who are curious of Twitter and then register an account and forget it when they find it not that interesting, to me, it is still unable to explain why "About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times" and "buy Twitter followers" service successfully explains the phenomena.

Prof. David Lankes, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University has been doing research on participatory librarianship and conversation theory. One of the ideas is "Knowledge is created through conversation". Twitter provides an efficient way for conversants to exchange views and ideas. Tweeting will be meaningless if there is no interaction involved. And fake followers could be easily detected.

Oh, for the interaction, I feel so sad there is almost no comments on this blog. Comments! Comments! Comments! Please let me know what you think, share your viewpoints with me!