A few moths ago, The Big Lead wrote about how the New York Jets had noticeably more fake Twitter followers than any other NFL team. At the time, 38% of the Jets followers were fake while for other teams the number was in the teens and low 20s. Being a Jets fan I was curious so I decided to do a follow-up to see if the numbers had changed at all in the past 3 months and I was shocked at what I found.
According to StatusPeople.com, this is the breakdown of the Jets Twitter followers.
Wow. Somehow the Jets twitter account managed to acquire 22% more fake followers in just 3 months. That means about 330,000 of their over 550,00 followers are fake. Let’s take a look at how other teams have changed though.
The Bears had 20% fake followers before so this is a decent increase, but then as you’ll see below the Packers only went from 23% to 26%.
Looking at a few more teams, the Giants saw a bump from 13% to 27% and the Patriots saw a similar bump going from 13% to 25%. So what does this all mean? Well as a whole, every team I looked at saw a bump in fake twitter followers but the Jets were by far the largest percentage. So are the Jets really buying fake followers? That would be the obvious take-away, but I would think that they are smarter than that, especially considering that this was written about 3 months ago.
So then did StatusPeople change their algorithm? I couldn’t find any evidence to that, but on their website it says “If you’re very, very ‘popular’ (over 50k followers) the tool will still provide good insight but may better reflect your current follower activity rather than your whole follower base.” Ok that might has something to do with it, but then still that would imply that either the Jets recently bought Twitter followers or spambots love following them. Whatever the case, it’s a weird situation. It would be great to see what the people behind @nyjets have to say about this.
