Followers Squared. Your Follower's Followers

The whole fake follower’s thing on Twitter is so boringly, mind numbingly crass.  The concept of people buying followers is just so indicative of the worst sides of human nature that I have to pause for a minute, gather myself and calm down.

Who would buy fake followers?  Recent research is showing that many people in the public eye have and do. see Social Media Today Blog Article on Fake Followers  The people and presumably the Marketing agencies that did this must have realised that it would backfire sooner or later. What were they doing?

It was only a matter of time before the Data would show up the facts and the inconsistencies.  The blatantly obvious thing about social media is that it is all recorded on servers and the data can be examined in infinitesimal detail at any subsequent time.  Eventually the data is crunched by some clever bit of software and the Walls of Social Media Faking Jericho come tumbling down.

Surely one of the main things about Social Media is the need for reality.  Social Transparency is the key word.  That’s why you can’t be a Celebrity who two times your wife anymore, or a regime that represses it’s people and pretends it isn’t .  Social Media is about real communication, between real people and we are all getting better at using it and spotting the fakers.

Come on Guys GET REAL!

I could go on, but I won’t ………

A good way to establish influence on Twitter and to examine the reach of a Twitter user is to look at the followers of their followers.  For the sake of this article I have called this Followers Squared as in effect I am saying that we can best judge Twitter influence by multiplying Twitter users follower’s by their follower’s follower numbers.  Followerwonk is a useful tool for looking at Twitter follower statistics and here I am using figures taken from Followerwonk showing the followers of various people and how many followers their followers have (Followers Squared).

These pictures show the follower’s followers (Follower Squared) stats of two famous politicians. Although they both have staggeringly high follower counts (multi million) they perform particularly badly when you start looking at their Follower Squared stats (particularly note the average and median followers of followers) ……

The following BBC Journalistic has far fewer followers (around 6,000) but has particularly good Follower Squared stats.  Also check his Average of 1901!! His Twitter account also ranks higher than both the politicians on Google too ….. of course there is a correspondence! 

I wouldn’t dare infer that these politicians might have fake followers but I would say that the BBC Journalist doesn’t and is obviously very influential when tweeting and being re-tweeted.

And er … um …. I better come clean ……… here are my stats …..

Phew! not too bad ……. I like my average and median ….. but don’t worry I won’t be standing for President … just yet ……. I can’t …. I’m British …… but David Cameron better watch out! …

And I’m sure that I could appeal to a few ….. Twitter Moms ….. ;)

By SEO STEER