U.S President Barrack Obama is the champion of the American youth. Who didn’t know him on social network? No one, you bet on that. He was the first ever U.S President who used the influence of social networking websites as one of his resources during his presidential campaign.

Now they tell us, most of his Twitter followers are fakes? That can’t be, because dummies, bots or whatever you call those faker accounts can’t really vote. So what is this about Obama having fake followers?

According to a London-based social media marketing company, StatusPeople, 70% of Barrack Obama’s followers are fake profiles. The tool or app used is called Fake Follower Check. It’s an application that gets a sample of an account holder’s followers and tests it for fake, inactive and real followers. Apparently, the U.S President and his more than 19 million Twitter followers did not go unnoticed.

How the app did it?

Find out from this statement from Rob Waller, one of the founders of StatusPeople.

“Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers. We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake.”

Is that it? What if I am just a friendly person who wants to follow a lot of people? It’s hardly my fault if less than half of the people I followed return the favor. Does that make my profile account fake and me as well?

Is Obama to blame?

“From our initial analysis of this issue the more followers you have the more likely you are to attract fake or inactive accounts. The reasons for this obviously need some research. But from the data we collect over 30% of those accounts with 500,000 followers or more return a poor score from our App, whereas less than 1% of those with 5,000 followers or less, the majority of Twitter users, generates an equivalent score,” Waller states.

Based on what Waller wrote, it seems like high profile people such as Obama, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and others like them, who have an initially bloated follower count because of their offline popularity, are most likely prey to Twitter spammers.

So the answer to the question is a big NO. And no, Obama did not also buy Twitter followers, although we really have no way of knowing that for certain.

Popular personalities with fake Twitter followers [credits to Fast Company]

Lady Gaga (28,355,129 followers): 43% fake, 34% inactive

Justin Bieber (26,582,874 followers): 31% fake, 33% inactive

Cristiano Ronaldo (12,367,632 followers): 52% fake, 32% inactive

Kanye West (8,293,114 followers): 36% fake, 34% inactive

Snooki (5,424,072 followers): 17% fake, 40% inactive

Perez Hilton (5,401,665 followers): 17% fake, 50% inactive

Jack Dorsey (2,086,805 followers): 15% fake, 40% inactive

Biz Stone (1,946,554 followers): 16%, 54% inactive

Mindy Kaling (1,821,893 followers): 23% fake, 42% inactive

Fred Wilson (227,241 followers): 8% fake, 30% inactive

Eric Ripert (92,897 followers): 11% fake, 41% inactive

Caterina Fake (73,835 followers): 5% fake, 33% inactive

Eric Ries (67,194 followers): 5% fake, 21% inactive

Anthony de Rosa (33,770 followers): 6% fake, 32% inactive

Simply put, celebrities are a magnet for bots since they are easy to find and they give these bot accounts credibility. Besides, if you care to notice it, when you first sign up for Twitter, didn’t Twitter recommend these people on their “Who To Follow” section?

In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with buying Twitter followers. Anyway, there are other worst ways that marketers take the short-cut.

[Image credit: Soda Head]