Socialbakers Sorts the Tweet from the Chaff

Social media monitoring firm Socialbakers has announced the beta launch of a new app called 'Fake Followers', to help marketers identify how many Twitter followers are real, fake or inactive.

The firm offers social media benchmarking and analysis, including brand performance metrics, and says it monitors ten million corporate profiles on social media.

Using the new tool, marketers can type in their firm's username and authorise the app on its Twitter profile. This tool will then give its assessment of how many followers are 'fake or empty' Twitter accounts, the percentage of inactive accounts, and the percentage of legitimate accounts.

Fake followers are identified by the repetition of spam phrases such as 'diet', 'make money', and 'work from home'; by tweets that are repeated in full more than three times; by excessive retweeting - where more than 90% of the account's tweets are RTs; and by inactivity - accounts that have never tweeted.

Inactive followers are identified as those with only one or two retweets, or where the last tweet is older than three months.

While the firm concedes that definitions of fake followers will vary, it believes those meeting the tool's criteria can sensibly be described as 'empty'.

Web site: www.socialbakers.com .