How many of your Twitter followers are fake?

Have you ever stopped to wonder how many of your Twitter followers are fake? Or, more importantly, when you or your client are buying endorsements from somebody with a mega number of followers, are they real. Or, if you are trying measure influence, what figure should you attribute somebody with?

Back in November of last year, StatusPeople.com did an analysis of Katie Perry and come up with an estimate that 42% of her followers were fake, 36% were inactive, and 22% were good. Of course with nearly 50 million followers, even 22% good produces quite a few people.

For the loss of a small amount of privacy (you have to sign in with your Twitter account), you can check your own ratio of fake followers with StatusPeople – my score showed that I had 5% fake followers. So, you can get fake followers without having to buy them.</p?

You can also find out more about your followers, or somebody else’s follower using SocialBakers’ FakeFollowers (they had me at 6% fake, but 90% active) – again you have to sign in with your Twitter account. But, as Chereen Zaki posting on Forbes pointed out, back in March, buying followers could cost you your job!