tangent4ronpaul
08-31-2012, 05:04 AM
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/08/obama-has-millions-of-fake-twitter-followers/1?csp=obnetwork#.UECTiJbud8E
President Obama's Twitter account has 18.8 million followers -- but more than half of them really don't exist, according to reports.
A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers," The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased.
"The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have," the Times reports.
"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."
Notes the Times:
If accurate, the number of fake followers out there is surprising. According to the StatusPeople tool, 71 percent of Lady Gaga's nearly 29 million followers are "fake" or "inactive." So are 70 percent of President Obama's nearly 19 million followers.
Republican opponent Mitt Romney has far fewer Twitter followers -- not quite 900,000 -- but it's a good bet that some of them are fake as well.
Both campaigns have denied buying Twitter followers.
Buying Their Way to Twitter Fame
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/fashion/twitter-followers-for-sale.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1345810035-hPtdwhoE1D2MaX4UUGwl9g
So in June he bought a small city’s worth for $424.15, raising his Twitter follower count from about 700 to more than 220,000.
So that's about a fifth of a cent per twitter follower...
The practice is surprisingly easy. A Google search for “buy Twitter followers” turns up dozens of Web sites like USocial.net, InterTwitter.com, and FanMeNow.com that sell Twitter followers by the thousands (and often Facebook likes and YouTube views). At BuyTwitterFollow.com, for example, users simply enter their Twitter handle and credit card number and, with a few clicks, see the ranks of their followers swell in three to four days.
Will Mitchell, the founder of Clear Presence Media, a marketing company outside Tampa, Fla., said that he has bought more than a million followers for his clients, which include musicians, start-ups and a well-known actress he declined to identify.
“And it’s so cheap, too,” he said. In one instance, Mr. Mitchell said, he bought 250,000 for $2,500, or a penny each.
One site, Fiverr, an online classified for cheap marketing services, has several ads offering 1,000 Twitter followers for $5.
Heddi Cundle, founder of MyTab.co, a San Francisco company that helps people raise money for trips, spent $5 on Fiverr to buy 200 followers last October, when her site started. By the next month, “we had about 1,100 to 1,200 people on both Twitter and Facebook, which was amazing,” she said. “We needed that to get ourselves going.”
Fake Twitter followers briefly made the news in July, when Mitt Romney’s Twitter following jumped by more than 100,000 in one weekend — a much faster rate than usual. A flurry of news reports purported to expose the practice of buying followers. “Romney Twitter account gets upsurge in fake followers, but from where?” read a headline on the NBC News Technolog blog.” (The Romney campaign has denied it bought followers.) Similar claims were lobbed at Newt Gingrich last year; his campaign also denied that he paid for any of his 1.3 million-strong Twitter following.
...
Twitter followers are sold in two ways: “Targeted” followers, as they are known in the industry, are harvested using software that seeks out Twitter users with similar interests and follows them, betting that many will return the favor. “Generated” followers are from Twitter accounts that are either inactive or created by spamming computers — often referred to as “bots.”
The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have.
http://fakers.statuspeople.com/
He recently asked about “the theoretical maximum” Twitter followers he can purchase.
“They said, ‘You could probably get over a million, a million and a half,’ ” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Why not? I can afford it.’ ”
==
Buying targeted followers might be an interesting way of making something go viral - say a write in Ron Paul campaign... The one woman's experience where she spent $5 to buy 200 followers and a month later had gained an additional 900-1000 followers that she had not bought looks like it has real potential.
Any thoughts?
-t
President Obama's Twitter account has 18.8 million followers -- but more than half of them really don't exist, according to reports.
A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers," The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased.
"The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have," the Times reports.
"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."
Notes the Times:
If accurate, the number of fake followers out there is surprising. According to the StatusPeople tool, 71 percent of Lady Gaga's nearly 29 million followers are "fake" or "inactive." So are 70 percent of President Obama's nearly 19 million followers.
Republican opponent Mitt Romney has far fewer Twitter followers -- not quite 900,000 -- but it's a good bet that some of them are fake as well.
Both campaigns have denied buying Twitter followers.
Buying Their Way to Twitter Fame
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/fashion/twitter-followers-for-sale.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1345810035-hPtdwhoE1D2MaX4UUGwl9g
So in June he bought a small city’s worth for $424.15, raising his Twitter follower count from about 700 to more than 220,000.
So that's about a fifth of a cent per twitter follower...
The practice is surprisingly easy. A Google search for “buy Twitter followers” turns up dozens of Web sites like USocial.net, InterTwitter.com, and FanMeNow.com that sell Twitter followers by the thousands (and often Facebook likes and YouTube views). At BuyTwitterFollow.com, for example, users simply enter their Twitter handle and credit card number and, with a few clicks, see the ranks of their followers swell in three to four days.
Will Mitchell, the founder of Clear Presence Media, a marketing company outside Tampa, Fla., said that he has bought more than a million followers for his clients, which include musicians, start-ups and a well-known actress he declined to identify.
“And it’s so cheap, too,” he said. In one instance, Mr. Mitchell said, he bought 250,000 for $2,500, or a penny each.
One site, Fiverr, an online classified for cheap marketing services, has several ads offering 1,000 Twitter followers for $5.
Heddi Cundle, founder of MyTab.co, a San Francisco company that helps people raise money for trips, spent $5 on Fiverr to buy 200 followers last October, when her site started. By the next month, “we had about 1,100 to 1,200 people on both Twitter and Facebook, which was amazing,” she said. “We needed that to get ourselves going.”
Fake Twitter followers briefly made the news in July, when Mitt Romney’s Twitter following jumped by more than 100,000 in one weekend — a much faster rate than usual. A flurry of news reports purported to expose the practice of buying followers. “Romney Twitter account gets upsurge in fake followers, but from where?” read a headline on the NBC News Technolog blog.” (The Romney campaign has denied it bought followers.) Similar claims were lobbed at Newt Gingrich last year; his campaign also denied that he paid for any of his 1.3 million-strong Twitter following.
...
Twitter followers are sold in two ways: “Targeted” followers, as they are known in the industry, are harvested using software that seeks out Twitter users with similar interests and follows them, betting that many will return the favor. “Generated” followers are from Twitter accounts that are either inactive or created by spamming computers — often referred to as “bots.”
The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have.
http://fakers.statuspeople.com/
He recently asked about “the theoretical maximum” Twitter followers he can purchase.
“They said, ‘You could probably get over a million, a million and a half,’ ” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Why not? I can afford it.’ ”
==
Buying targeted followers might be an interesting way of making something go viral - say a write in Ron Paul campaign... The one woman's experience where she spent $5 to buy 200 followers and a month later had gained an additional 900-1000 followers that she had not bought looks like it has real potential.
Any thoughts?
-t