30% Of Obama’s Twitter Followers Are Fake

Sites include Twitter.com . Published on September 7th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Barak Obama is by far the most tech savvy, blackberry-using president the US has ever seen, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t subject to the same rules of social media everyone else is subjected to. With 19 million followers, President Obama has a fan base to rival most celebrities and like most celebrities, it turns out a handful of his followers are fake. 30% to be precise.

The analysis of Obama’s Twitter followers comes to us courtesy of StatusPeople, who does routine checks on celebrity Twitter accounts. Mitt Romney’s account also has a heft number of fake followers too. His account doesn’t have nearly the following that Obama has (900,000) but nonetheless he still has around 135,000 fake followers. Another 270,000 are said to be inactive accounts.

The fake and inactive account phenomenon is not new. Try as hard as it may, Twitter cannot keep spammers out and even people who wouldn’t consider themselves spammers routinely set up more than one Twitter account.

The problem is not confined to Twitter either and social media rivals Facebook and Google+ both have to do some weeding every now and then.

Good thing for Obama he has such a huge following; the fake accounts doesn’t seem to hamper his ability to connect with his supporters and the race for the White House is definitely setting up to be a social media showdown.

Do you think Obama will win votes using social media this time round? Share your thoughts below.