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NBC's Alex Moe
DES MOINES, Iowa -- The Newt Gingrich campaign has denied recent allegations that more than 90% of the former House Speaker’s Twitter followers are not real.
Gingrich’s handle, @newtgingrich, has more than 1.3 million Twitter followers, more than 20 times the number of followers for Mitt Romney, the next closest with more than 63,000 followers. In fact, Gingrich's followers are more than six times the entire field of announced candidates combined and double Twitter star Sarah Palin's number of followers.
Campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond wrote in a statement that Gingrich is not responsible for the legitimacy of his followers.
“Twitter alone is the authority on counting followers and policing their legitimacy," Hammond wrote. "At no time has the campaign or Gingrich Communications employed an outside group to inflate the number of followers of @newtgingrich. Any accusation of the kind is a lie, a smear and unsubstantiated.”
The response comes after a New York based search company, PeekYou, announced yesterday that it had analyzed Gingrich’s followers and found a ‘consumer ratio’ of 8% (or about 106,055 accounts). According to PeekYou, “A Consumer Ratio measures the percentage of a Twitter audience that is identified as a “consumer” or “voter” in Newt’s case, vs business, private/anonymous and spam accounts.”
“We have seen some pretty low ‘Consumer Ratios’ in our testing, but Newt Gingrich’s was the lowest we had ever seen. At first, we actually thought it might have been a bug on our side, but a quick manual look at the data showed our analysis was true,” Michael Hussey, CEO and founder of PeekYou, said on the website.
Ben Smith at Politico reported, per Hussey, "Gingrich's place on Twitter's now-defunct suggested user list was also a good explanation for the data he found." Smith also linked to a Tweet by Hussey, in which he wrote, "@peekyou is not accusing @newtgingrich of buying followers. Spammy followers could be related to being on the suggested user list."
Here is a breakdown as of today of the follower counts for those campaigning (or possibly going to campaign):
@newtgingrich 1,326,122
@MittRomney 63,824
@TeamBachmann 24,205
@JonHuntsman 8,030
@timpawlenty 45,786
@RickSantorum 13,714
@RonPaul 20,008
@THEHermanCain 52,576
@SarahPalinUSA 621,037
@TexGov 13,880
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Looks like a case of masturbatory twittering!
This is really getting crazy. You can't believe half of what you read or see anymore.
Wired magazine has mentioned this type of thing where companies actually pay people (or firms) to friend them and follow their tweets. Many Facebook and Twitter accounts are created under various aliases and with a few hundred people a company or individual can quickly get inflated numbers of followers causing them to rank higher attracting curious real people seeing the rise to also tune in.
Money could always buy popularity and friends in the physical social world (throw big expensive parties and they will come), so it's no surprise that it can work as well or better in a social networking medium.
And meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter love this because the more subscribers they have, the higher their company values grow and the more they make on ad revenue. Soon it will be apparent that there are many more total social networking accounts than there are total people, but that would just prove how good these companies CEOs are further pumping the stock values and bonuses. These companies definitely have the ability to count how many real active accounts they have and detect mass updates of new accounts all friending or following the same source, so they have to know what's going on.
I'd be willing to bet that if these sites imposed a minimal subscription fee of just $1 a year to keep your account active, that their actual numbers would drop dramatically overnight, so they may be able to get away with charging for some extra things, but definitely not for basic user registrations.
I have heard the word "Twitter" but I have no idea what it is. Can someone explain it? I thought twitter was something a bird could do.
Newt - the village idiot.