A social media analytics company called Socialbakers is offering Fakefollowers, a free tool that the company says will determine what percentage of your Twitter faithful are fake, inactive or good.
Before doing that though, you should choose whether you want to follow Socialbakers on Twitter. You do that by checking or unchecking a box below the "check my account" field. The default value for the box is "follow."
After clicking the check button, you'll be taken to a screen that informs you what the app will be able to do if you authorize it to access your account. For example, it will be able to read tweets from your timeline, see who you follow and follow new people, update a profile and post tweets to you.
The app won't access your direct messages or see your Twitter password.
According to Socialbakers, if from zero to 20 percent of your followers are fake, your account is solid and you have nothing to worry about.
If your fake or empty followers score is in the 20 to 50 percent range, caution is in order. However, if you have a large number of followers, racking up a score in that range can be expected.
A fake or empty score in the 50 to 70 percent bracket is a cause for concern, and a score more than 70 percent suggests that your account has been compromised, and it may be time to create a new one.
Socialbakers identifies fake or empty accounts based on a number of criteria. They include:
- The ratio of following to followers is less than 50:1
- Tweets repeatedly include spam phrases like diet, make money and work from home
- Tweets are repeated more than three times
- More than 90 percent of the account's tweets are retweets
- More than 90 percent of tweets are links and the account has a following to followers ratio of 7:1 or greater.
- The account has never tweeted
By the way, Socialbakers' Twitter account, which has almost 23,000 followers, has only 2 percent fake and 2 percent inactive accounts.
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