New study finds big brands, celebs are buying Twitter followers

Bigger is best… when it comes to your following that is, and buying followers on Twitter seems to be the name of the game (if you have the money of course).

Who would have thought the Twitter underground can become such a dirty affair? As shown by the New York Times, a recent study by Italian researchers, Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, found that multinational companies and celebrities are suspected of buying Twitter followers. This was done by looking at some unusual following spikes of big brands such as Pepsi, Mercedes-benz and Louis Vuitton who are among those suspected.

For example two years ago Pepsi is believed to have added 71 686 followers in only one day. That seems a little too impressive for it to be organic. Also, famous rapper, 50 Cent lost 190 342 followers in just one day last year January. Suspicious behavior like this doesn’t seize to raise eyebrows.

According to the New York Times, many of these brands did not respond for comments, except for Pepsi which explained that the spike was due to extensive advertising. A Pepsi spokesperson has been cited as saying that the strange spikes were due to “paid activations with Twitter — such as promoted tweets — that were designed to boost our following around key brand activations.” According to Status People, which is used to verify account followers, the massive beverage company has about 66% real followers where the other 34% is made out of bots or fake accounts.

This new research came after a study done by the same Italian researchers, concluded that of the 200-million active Twitter users, 20-million are fake. That’s 10% of Twitter’s monthly active user base.

Although not entirely new allegations concerning Twitter, suspected reasons for buying followers are simply to feed egos or boost presence. Brands simply want to have a decent image by showing how big their following is. Other reasons include an increased online presence or a better SEO. The more clicks, the higher its results are on Google’s search.

According to the study, there is a multi-million dollar underground industry trading Twitter followers. The industry, the researchers claim, are worth between US$40 and US$360-million. Other Twitter accounts that appear to have taken part in questionable behaviour are those of rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, Russian prime minister Dmitri Medvedev and other US politicians.