The Twitter legitimacy check
We published an article about the top 55 Pro triathlete tweeters and there have been questions raised if all numbers were legitimate, so we dug deeper into that issue. We used a now popular tool called Fakers that has been applauded by the folks at TechCrunch and Mashable and below are the numbers spit out by that site when we added the top 5 International male and the top 5 North American male twitter handles.
As for these numbers, Inactive is actually a tricky data point as some folks only use Twitter as a news aggregate and they may never tweet at all, so that has to be taken with a grain of salt. But Fake indicates Spam bots and other non legitimate followers.
Chris MacCormack (AUS) is @MaccaNow on Twitter (138,403 followers)
Olympic champion Alistair Brownlee (GBR) is @AliBrownleeTri on Twitter (75,554 followers)
His younger brother Jonathan Brownlee (GBR) is @Jonny_Brownlee on Twitter (54,646 followers)
Javier Gomez (ESP) is the highest non English native on this list under @Jgomeznoya (51,984 followers)
Craig Alexander (AUS) is not surprisingly @CrowieAlexander on Twitter (35,893 followers)
Chris Lieto is @chrislieto on Twitter (30,959 followers)
Olympic champion Simon Whitfield (CAN) is @SimonWhitfield on Twitter (26,918 followers)
Matty Reed (USA) is @boomboomreed on Twitter (14,412 followers)
Andy Potts (USA) is @Andy_Potts on Twitter (14,368 followers)
Matt Russell (USA) has the @MattRussellTri account (13,536 followers)
For comparison notes here are the numbers of @HerbertKrabel the editor of this feature. (2,705 followers)
And Jordan Rapp aka @Rappstar the CTO of slowtwitch (11,814 followers)
We had only planned to sample a few Twitter accounts, but we decided to look at all 55 and it turned out that 5 of these had a completely high number of fake followers, while the other 50 Twitter accounts all hovered in the 5% – 20% range, which appears to be standard.
We will add part 2 with the Female Pro Tweet check over the weekend.
