The Premier League Team With The Most Fake Followers
·
Just over one third (36%) of internet users are Premier League fans.
·
44% of fans check Twitter
for sports content at
least once a day.
·
19.1% of fans use Twitter as
their main source of football news.
·
Liverpool F.C. is the Premier
League team with the MOST fake
followers – at 43.10%.
·
Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. is the Premier League team with the LEAST fake followers.
According
to Media Chain in the report Navigating
the Next Generation Fan: How Football is Social, just
over one third (36%) of internet users are Premier League fans and in
today’s current climate, much of their interaction is through social media.
Of course, Twitter was perhaps the first social media platform to make it big in
football; its reactive nature suiting the fast-paced, dramatic world of the
beautiful game to a tee.
However, research has found that several
factors, such as the rise in fake news,
spam, bots and propaganda, across social media channels has seen Twitter’s
dominance in the world of football decline in recent months – and it’s easy to
see why.
Livefootballtickets.com
conducted an experiment to find out the average number of fake followers* found
per the Twitter account of current Premier League teams, to identify which account is the most
susceptible to inauthentic followers.
To achieve this, Livefootballtickets inserted
the Twitter handle of each team into the Fake Followers Audit**
tool on SparkToro (created by Moz founder, Rand Fishkin) to analyse the results***.
Livefootballtickets
discovered an average 43.1% of accounts/individuals that follow Liverpool F.C.
are fake – the highest
total of all Premier League teams analysed.
Pipping Manchester United F.C. (42%) and Arsenal F.C. (40.5%) to
the post.
Other Premier League teams with a high
infiltration of fake followers include Brighton
& Hove Albion Football Club (38.5%) and The Terriers, Huddersfield Town A.F.C. (37%.)
Even some of the biggest clubs can’t escape
suspect activity. The Blues (Chelsea F.C.)
have a fake following averaging 36.7%, while Man City F.C. loom close behind with 36.4%.
Spurs
rank 8th in the table at an average 36.3%.
Alternatively, Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. were found to have the lowest average
number of fake followers – at 27.9%. Just above the Wolves, maintaining a low
average of inauthentic accounts, is Newcastle
United F.C. (29.1%), Southampton
F.C. (29.6%) and Leicester City F.C. with 29.7%.
“With
the world like it is today, it’s no wonder we are beginning to approach social
media in a cautious manner.
My
advice to footie fans is this: it’s right to think smart about social media,
our experiment proves it, but don’t let it make you feel like you can’t engage
with your team and fellow fans on platforms like Twitter. Social media is a
fantastic space to stay informed on all things football; be it scores,
transfers or the sackings of your favourite players and managers!
If
you are concerned about the activity you are exposed to, check your settings
and privacy section. Taking Twitter as an example, you can mute people who don’t
have a default profile photo, who haven’t confirmed their email and their phone
number. This won’t hide all inauthentic accounts, but it might help slim down
the chances of coming across suspect activity.”
*This
tool defines “fake followers” as accounts that are
unreachable (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or
because they’re no longer active on Twitter.)
**How the fake follower audit works: each audit analyses
a sample of 2,000 random accounts that follow {insert Twitter handle), then
looks at 25+ factors correlated with spam/bot/low quality accounts. None of
these, alone, indicate a spam/bot/low quality account; but, when many factors
are present, there’s a strong correlation with low quality. Factors like
Display Name, Tweet Language and Over Sharing, for example.
***Bearing
in mind the data is live, Livefootballtickets extracted
figures from 02/04/2019.
Source
Life Football Tickets
The Premier League Team With The Most Fake Followers
Reviewed by Mili Ponce
on
Friday, April 12, 2019
Rating:
Reviewed by Mili Ponce
on
Friday, April 12, 2019
Rating:
Mili Ponce
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