Video: How Do You Spot Fake Twitter Followers?

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COLUMBUS,  Miss. (WCBI) – From trending topics, to hash tags, Twitter has worked its way into our collective consciousness.

Feeds aren’t always accurate, and they’re certainly not the most thorough means of communication, but Twitter is where news breaks in 2013.

Individuals and organizations are quick to point out how many followers they have, but that number is often wildly inflated.

How many people are following you?

Thousands?

Millions?

Well that’s great, but, founder of hagancomputerservices.com , and Mississippi State Student Hagan Walker cautions, ” Usually, what happens, what a lot of top businesses do, is actually purchase fake followers. Someone actually makes some fake accounts and you can go on line and actually purchase those.”

On the corporate level, it makes sense, at least on the surface, but the correlation between Twitter and profitability is murky at best.

Hagan explains, ” I guess it’s easy to spoof a lot of things in the business world, but this is one of the easiest, if you go on there and purchase some people to follow you, you are not giving a true account of who you are and what you do.”

But how do individual people, not named Ashton Kutcher, get their followers into 5 figures?

Hagan has a theory, ” These people that are trying to sell these fake accounts, they’re following you, and people see their presence, maybe they’ll go on and actually purchase some of these accounts.”

That seems like cheating.

So how can you tell if your followers are really following along?

Hagan says, ” If you get online and search Google and Twitter fake followers you can actually enter your name and your password and it will tell you who is an active Twitter member.”

That means someone who actually logs on at least once a week.

Your results could be surprising, but don’t get down, Twitter is often fickle and frivolous. Hagan says, ” Well, the top thing I see, right now, is Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, so that seems to be the top trend right now. Syria is 5th on that list.”

And that should tell you all you really need to know.

There are more than half a billion twitter accounts world wide, but how many of those are active users is anybody’s guess.