The Internet is full of bots, which means that not only may the traffic to your website be inflated but so too your social media following.
Twitteraudit.com is a site that quickly analyzes a sample of an account’s followers to estimate how many are fake. For Trump and Clinton, TwitterAudit estimates that about 40% of their followers are unreal. But fake follower accounts are so prevalent on Twitter that TwitterAudit gives 40% a green thumbs up!
And they’re not saying that Clinton and Trump paid for those fake accounts to follow them, although you can find “services” that claim that they’ll get you 5,000, 10,000 or more new Twitter followers overnight for just a few dollars.
After all, TwitterAudit estimates that half of Starbucks’ followers are fake.
No, these are bots that go around following lots of accounts, probably hoping for followbacks generating links to their spammy sites.
This is another reason why McKinsey estimates that email marketing is 40X more powerful for customer acquisition than social media, and why an email to 1,000 people can generate far greater results than a post to 10,000 – only 2-3% of followers even see a Tweet, and 40-50% of those may be fake!
PS: According to TwitterAudit 84% of my 5,200 Twitter followers are U.S. Prime Graded real.
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