[CelebTweets] 40% of Genevieve Nnaji's Twitter Followers are Fake

The practice of buying twitter followers is no longer a big deal. Almost every Nigerian celebrity uses or used this method to get their first few thousand twitter followers and nobody would even know... until now.

I became interested in this "fake twitter followers" research when a report about Pastor Chris Oyakilome being the most followed Nigerian celebrity on twitter was posted all over the internet some days back. Pastor Chris has about 1.1million followers and Wizkid being the second most followed celeb in Nigeria has about 542 thousand twitter followers. Do they really have that much followers? Are they buying followers?

"Fake followers check" from status people gave me the answer to the above questions on a platter of gold.

Sometime last year, status people created a little tool called "fake followers check". This tool does exactly what its name says; it checks twitter account followers to see if they are real or fake (careful with this tool, once connected to your twitter account, it can follow people without your permission).

According to status people, this is how the tool works: "We take a sample of your follower data. Up to 100,000 (recently upgraded from 1,000) records depending on how 'popular' you are and assess them against a number of simple spam criteria. On a very basic level spam accounts tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets. But in contrast they tend to follow a lot of other accounts".

We don't necessarily need a robot to spot a fake twitter follower; they are actually so easy to spot. A fake follower usually does not have a profile picture, no bio, little or no tweets, little or no followers but they follow a lot of people. If you manually scan a celebrity's twitter followers you can spot the fake ones but we need the robot to calculate and give us the overall score.

Pastor Chris Oyakilome tops the faker's list as 52% of his twitter followers are fake while Genevieve Nnaji sits on the second position with 40% fake followers. All the other celebrities in the top 10 most followed on twitter list had around thirty something percent fake followers.

Just 30% of Wizkid's twitter followers are fake making him the last celebrity in the faker top 10 list.

Here's the full faker list of the top 10 Nigerian celebrities with the highest twitter followers:

Pastor Chris Oyakilome: @PastorChrisLive; 1.1million followers; 52% fake
Genevieve Nnaji: @GenevieveNnaji1; 293k followers; 40% fake
Peter Okoye: @PeterPsquare; 279k followers; 39% fake
BankyW: @BankyW; 367k followers; 37% fake
D'Banj: @iamdbanj; 515k followers; 36% fake
Tiwa savage: @TiwaSavage; 271k followers; 35% fake
Davido: @iam_Davido; 300k followers; 33% fake
Don Jazzy: @DONJAZZY; 473k followers; 32% fake
2Face Idibia: @2faceidibia; 343k followers; 31%
Wizkid: @wizkidayo; 542k followers; 30% fake
When I subtracted the fake followers from each celebrity's total number of followers, our very dear Pastor Chris Oyakilome remains the most followed Nigerian celebrity on twitter but unfortunately, the same can't be said of the most followed Nigerian female celebrity, Genevieve Nnaji.

After the subtraction, Tiwa Savage became the twitter queen beating Genevieve with about 400 followers.

Also, Tuface Idibia displaced BankyW and became the fifth Nigerian celebrity with the highest twitter followers.

Here's the list of the top 10 Nigerian Celebrity with the highest real twitter followers:

Pastor Chris Oyakilome: 554k real followers
Wizkid: 379k real followers
D'Banj: 329k real followers
Don Jazzy: 321k real followers
2Face Idibia: 237k real followers
BankyW: 231k real followers
Davido: 201k real followers
Tiwa savage: 176,757k real followers
Genevieve Nnaji: 176,323k real followers
Peter Okoye: 170k real followers
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