The Twitter Deficit

This is not how you keep the grassroots engaged:

Forty-one percent of the commander in chief’s 18.6 million Twitter followers are fake, 35 percent are inactive and 25 percent are “good,” or likely to be authentic, according to Fake Follower Check, which scours the messaging service specifically for phony adherents.

About 45% of Mitt Romney’s followers are believed to be authentic.

For what it’s worth, I just tried the Fake Follower Check, and my 13,000 or so followers look like this:

It’s difficult to get a read on those “inactive” accounts, whether they’re followers of mine or Obama’s or anyone else’s. Lots of folks sign on to Twitter to follow people they like, and not to engage or broadcast. So some percentage of those inactive accounts are probably still being used, but there’s no way of telling what percentage.

Now I just wish FFC would tell me which followers are fake, so I could block them. I don’t run up the follower count just for the sake of running up the follower count. Spammers I block at once, but the silent fakes are harder to discern.