Number of followers is no longer a valid indicator
Bots crowd Twitter
henry0
10:08 am on Jun 9, 2012 (gmt 0)
Excerpt from Reuters:
A sample of 10,000 followers was analyzed for each company. A software used a random algorithm to extract a sample selection of followers and two classed of parameters established whether the user's behaviors is most likely to be human or carried out by a bot.
Spam attracts spam. If you clear the junk from your followers it builds up slowly. If you leave junk there, it seems to rapidly attract huge amounts more.
Leosghost
8:02 pm on Jun 9, 2012 (gmt 0)
A similar analysis was carried out last year in relation to the number of "followers" of a certain US Senator..
It was found that 80% or more of his "followers", were robots set up by his own PR company..the survey then did some more checking and analysis of other twitter accounts with high follower numbers ( those over 1000 or so ) and concluded that 80% of all twitter accounts being "bots" was probably an accurate assessment..
