In a battle between the President of the United States and me, I win.
At issue is the measurement of a given Twitter account’s percentage of “real” Twitter followers, as determined by StatusPeople, a British site that analyzes a Twitter account’s followers, and uses a simple formula for determining how many of those followers are “fake” or “inactive”. The formula: followers with few to no followers of their own are flagged as “fake”, and followers with no recent tweets are deemed “inactive”.
According to StatusPeople, my list of authentic Twitter followers (@SteveOHearn), as of August 25, 2012, about 10 AM – is 97 percent, of which 88 percent are active, and nine percent are currently inactive. Only 3 percent were identified by StatusPeople as fake.
I ran the same analysis at the same time on the account of the President of the United States. He’s showing up as 70 percent “real”, of which StatusPeople says 39 percent are currently inactive, leaving 31 percent authentic and active. StatusPeoples says POTUS has 30 percent “fake” followers.
I win.
Just sayin’.
Here’s the screenshot for my own metric, see below.
And here’s the score for POTUS, aka President Barack Obama:
There you go.
One note: there are a lot of news reports going around claiming that the President’s percentage of “fake” followers is much higher. One national paper puts the “fake” number at 70 percent. Presumably they are lumping together the “fake” with the “inactive”, and calling them all “fake”. But that’s obviously inaccurate. “Inactive” might be fake, but also may have been bonafide users who got bored with Twitter. Maybe this is more of a statement about Twitter’s product life cycle than the authenticity of the President’s Twitter followers. We don’t really know, I don’t anyway, not yet. But one thing is for sure, the graphic above is authentic – StatusPeople declared 30 percent of the president’s Twitter followers to be “fake”, not 70 percent. The “inactive” 39 percent is subject to interpretation and further analysis. I don’t care what your politics are, but whatever you do, don’t misrepresent data. Although … we could probably launch an entire new media organization on the subject of statistics that are misused and abused, accidentally or otherwise.
Want to check your own percentage of fake Twitter followers? Click here to use the same Web app I used to create the reports shown above.