Who is faking it among the Lebanese top Twitter users?

September 21, 2012 /   / Comments
Twitter users and the media are amazed and impressed by the amount of followers that celebrities and some influencers have acquired since they started using twitter.

To avoid any sampling bias from myself, I chose to use the "20 Most Powerful People on Twitter in Lebanon" list by 2famous.tv. I then used a service by Status People that allows you to figure out the percentage of fake followers a user has in addition to the percentage of inactive and good followers. I obtained the following results:


So what do we take from the above figures?
  • Most celebrities (singers, actors, presenters, etc...) have a big percentage of fake and inactive followers. This is mostly due to them (or their agencies) buying followers for bulk. Notice that most celebrities have 40% or less good followers. Notice how evident this is with Zaven's follower analysis: 69% are fake (which is a whopping majority) and only 11% are real followers. If we do the math, he would easily be removed from the Top 20 top tweeps list)
  • Activitists tend to have a small number of fake followers (such as the case of Assaad Thebian Nadine Mouawad and Imad Bazzi) but may have a significant number of inactive followers because their followers would've been active during periods of activism (like revolutions and protests)
  • Politicians also have a big number of inactive followers and this is probably due to the hype that was initially caused many people to join twitter to follow their leaders and eventually lost interest in twitter or tend to be consumers of content but not producers.
  • Anonymous accounts tend to have a high rate of real followers because they do not buy followers since they usually use their accounts to promote a cause of to say what's on their minds in a stress-relieving attempt.
What else can you conclude from these figures? And how many real followers do you have? Let us know in the comments below.
activism analysis Beirut celebrities fake Lebanon music social media twitter
Written by Mohammad Hijazi

About the author

Mohammad Hijazi is a marketing strategist, trainer and speaker based in Dubai. He has trained more than 25,000 professionals across 45 countries and writes here about brand, growth and communication.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
How do you determined the difference between fake and inactive and what program are you using to calculate this?
September 22, 2012 at 8:50 AM
Mohammad Hijazi said…
As mention in the introduction, I'm using this tool: http://fakers.statuspeople.com/Fakers. You can check how it works on their website.
September 22, 2012 at 3:09 PM
Unknown said…
While I agree many purchase followers, the tool by Status People is not accurate since it reflects only 1,000 sample across the followers list. They also have no way to determine who is inactive vs fake in a true manner. They do that by analysing who tweets at least once within a month and consider that an inactive people vs considering a fake person as someone who never tweets and just follows users. There are obviously users who are passive consumers and just want to consume content and these are very much a good percentage of Twitter users, and the ones who just read and rarely tweet are even a bigger one. None of the way that properly determine whether a user is fake or inactive is actually available through the Twitter API. Finally, if you run a test on a username multiple times, you get different results with high variations. Thanks
September 23, 2012 at 9:09 AM
racha said…
Sorry i missed the link, the color difference wasn't too apparent.
September 25, 2012 at 9:05 AM
Simon said…
Great post Hijazi :)
also a great list which includes some must follow people whom i didn't know they had a twitter account.
February 28, 2013 at 11:48 PM

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