How to tell if your Twitter followers are fake

Reaching over 6000 Twitter followers on my personal account had me feeling like OMG I could be an influencer! But I needed to know if all those followers were real and not just bots sent to make me feel nice.

So I found a site that runs a Twitter audit for you, called well, Twitter Audit. You first go to the website here and then log in with your Twitter account. You then type in your username in the bar like below and click ‘audit’.

My results were not half bad, I got a 98% real score, meaning only 116 of my followers are considered ‘fake’:

It also gave me a half-pie chart showing how Twitter Audit views my followers:

You can even run an audit for another username, so I ran one on Techtrends’ Twitter account, @techtrends_zm, and it scored 97% real follower count, with 106 followers considered fake:

Some of you may not care but if you’re into earning revenue via social media platforms like Twitter, it’s important to know how real your crowd is, and it’s also important for people who want to do business with you as a digital influencer to know that your followers are actually human on the other side of the screen. There’s just no point in selling to nobody right?

How the audit determines what follower is real or not is explained at the bottom of the Twitter Audit site:

‘Each audit takes a sample of up to 5000 (or more, if you subscribe to Pro) Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.’

Yes, people do buy fake followers to increase their count and seem influential but those fake accounts don’t regularly update their tweets and are eventually sieved as fake followers.

So, next time you see a tweep looking hella followed, run an audit on them and call their bull.