A study suggests that out of the 'Baby' singer's 37.3 million followers, only 17.8 million are true Beliebers.
- Apr 12, 2013
AceShowbiz - Justin Bieber may not be as popular as it seems, despite being the most-followed person on Twitter. SocialBakers reveals that nearly half of 37 million accounts following Bieber are fake and inactive. According to the social media statistic, the 19-year-old Canadian singer "only" has about 17.8 million real and active followers.
According to BBC, SocialBakers spots fake accounts by looking at the number of followers and seeing if genuine tweets have been posted, rather than spam. The data also considers fake accounts to continuously tweet buzz phrases such as "diet," "make money" and "work from home."
"With a huge celebrity Twitter account of this size and age it is completely normal to have between 20-50 percent of followers who are inactive or fake," Maje Crumpton, a spokesperson for Socialbakers, says in a statement. "It is not necessarily an indication of anything sinister."
Crumpton continues, "A high percentage of fans are likely to start accounts to follow celebrities and then stop using them. Of course, the larger the amount of followers, the harder it is to keep track of and remove inactive followers. You will no doubt see a similarly high numbers of inactive followers on any abnormally large celebrity Twitter account."
Bieber isn't the only celebrity with bogus followers. Jedward is actually worse as they have around 61 percent fake fans. Lady GaGa is lucky enough to claim back her title as the most-followed person on Twitter as she has 19 million genuine followers and pushes aside Bieber who overtook the title from her last year.
