Top SA Twitter users’ fake scores

South Africa’s most popular Twitter users continue to grow their followers, but how many of these followers are fake?

October 19, 2012

Trevor Noah, Gareth Cliff, and Bonang Matheba are South Africa’s top Twitter users with hundreds of thousands of followers. This is, however, far lower than international Twitter stars with millions of followers.

According to Twitter Counter, which provides statistics of Twitter usage across the globe, Lady Gaga is the most popular person on Twitter with over 30 million followers. Lady Gaga is followed by Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna and Britney Spears.

Curiously, some of these high profile celebrities follow a very high number of Twitter users. A very high number of Twitter followers can be a sign that a subscriber used a service (or did it themselves) to indiscriminately follow thousands of people in the hope to be followed back and hence increase their follower count.

US president Barack Obama, for example, is unlikely to have time to follow all tweets from the 671,660 people which he is apparently following.

StatusPeople has launched a service which claims to provide an accurate percentage of fake followers, which can be interesting to assess alongside a Twitter user’s number of followers, and the number of people followed.

The following table provides an overview of the top Twitter accounts globally, and StatusPeople’s fake score.

Twitter account	Followers	Following	Fakers %
@ladygaga	30,399,483	137,346	39%
@justinbieber	29,088,536	122,686	42%
@katyperry	27,894,973	115	32%
@rihanna	26,292,761	886	31%
@britneyspears	21,167,116	412,742	38%
@BarackObama	21,000,959	671,660	35%
@taylorswift13	19,710,167	82	29%
@shakira	18,451,068	69	33%
@YouTube	18,216,429	431	35%
@KimKardashian	16,378,369	179	19%

There is, as expected, a link between the number of people a Twitter user follows and their fake percentage.

South Africa’s top Twitter users are following far fewer people than their international counterparts, which should point to a lower fake percentage. This is indeed the case.

The following table provides an overview of South Africa’s most popular Twitter accounts, with StatusPeople’s fake score.

Twitter account	Followers
@Trevornoah	523,290	44	19%
@GarethCliff	355,312	88	22%
@Bonang_M	285,851	1,074	39%
@abdevilliers17	281,976	117	31%
@DJFreshSA	273,046	7,412	26%
@GraemeSmith49	253,821	106	31%
@Julius_S_Malema	233,710	103	27%
@News24	198,156	3,927	32%
@helenzille	187,635	1,843	23%
@Dalesteyn62	180,584	136	28%
@dineoranaka	180,125	885	24%
@5FM	177,739	2010	25%
@SAPresident	172,041	7	34%
@PigSpotter	144,455	16	24%