Are your Twitter followers human?

BANGALORE, INDIA: The number of tweet followers has come to be a sort of status symbol. But what Marco Camisani Calzolari, an entrepreneur and professor at Milan's ILUM University, says could be a bit disappointing for those longing to swell their followers. "A large share of social-media followers of the biggest companies are not human," he says.

In a recent study he found the computer-generated fans or inactive users following big brands on Twitter. To check if a follower is human, Camisani Calzolari used the number of posts from a fan's Twitter account and the use of correct punctuation in tweets etc.

According to a research, by June 2011 nearly half of Twitter followers of computer maker Dell-about 700,000-were bots.

In the recent American Presidential poll, the number of fake Twitter followers of Mitt Romney outnumbered that of Barack Obama. But when checked today, both of them had 28 pc of fake followers.

An analysis of Twitter followers of leading international companies shows that BlackBerry and Samsung Mobile have 27 pc and 12 pc bots, and Dell 15 pc.

Finding Twitter bots has been made easy by StatusPeople's Fakers app. Just enter the Twitter handle and the web app displays the percentage in seconds.

 Note: When we checked CIOL_News, the app score was 8 pc.