Broback's Blog

For those who help various organizations evaluate their real and potential online audiences, it’s always nice to find a promising new service that can help determine how much effective reach someone has online.

There’s been a lot of conversation of late in the political sphere surrounding how “real” candidates Twitter followings are, especially in a world where massive numbers of followers can be purchased.

I had the opportunity to test statuspeople.com, the “faker” detection service often referenced in these articles, and was impressed with what I found when the service was run against a very small, yet clearly defined Twitter account.

The other day a friend emailed me asking me to check out his twitter follower count. I was surprised to see it had surged by 7500 percent(!) His explanation for the thousands of new followers? Simple. “I bought ’em”. He had done so on a lark, just to test the service, and paid maybe $20 to garner over 10,000 new followers. Prior to this, he had carefully grew his followership — so I felt comfortable that about 13% of his now massive total follower count was “real.”

With this information, I ran to statuspeople.com to see what they thought of his followerbase. Here is what they came up with.

They nailed it pretty well IMHO….

Are the brand-name social metrics companies missing the boat?

A few weeks back I attended a carefully crafted social media “influencer” event (one where I did not have a hand in formulating the guest list) Initially I was concerned that I didn’t recognize many of the attendees. My fear of missing the boat was quickly dissipated though. One “VIP” I didn’t know seemed to have impressive numbers — over 20K followers while only following a few score in return. At first blush, it seemed the analysis/campaign done via a household-name social metrics platform had found someone intriguing. After running this person through statuspeople.com, I came to a different conclusion: