Want to know how many of your Twitter followers are fakes? Try this app to find out

Without question, there are quite a few spammers on Twitter. These fake accounts make you wonder how many active people truly do follow you on the service. Ever since people started talking about Facebook’s fake account issue, the spotlight has now been turned to Twitter. Is it full of “fakers?”

An app called “Fakers” from StatusPeople will scan your followers and let you know for sure:

Here’s how StatusPeople explains the methodology behind the service:

We take a sample of your follower data. Up to 500 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.

Those numbers seemed kind of low to me, and I’m still not entirely sure what StatusPeople considers to be a “faker”, but I will say that if this is close to being true, I’m impressed. Good job, good effort Twitter.

h/t @dens

➤ Fakers from Status People

UPDATE: I fully expect the “phony” functionality any day now:

2% of my followers are fake, and the other 98% of you are just phony. How many fake followers do you have? thenextweb.com/socialmedia/20…

— Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) August 14, 2012