- Upstart Business Journal contributor
2013年4月27日星期六
Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz and Louis Vuitton accused of buying fake Twitter followers
Two security researchers are alleging that several big name brands are padding their social media numbers by purchasing fake followers.
The New York Times reports that new research by Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli call out the likes of Pepsi (Nyse: PEP), Mercedes-Benz and Louis Vuitton as well as hip-hop bigwigs 50 Cent and Sean Combs, aka Diddy. It's a followup to their findings earlier this month that $18 buys 1,000 fake Twitter followers.
Stroppa and De Micheli based their claims on unexplained spikes in accounts following and unfollowing the accounts they studied that couldn't be explained by traditional social media campaigns.
At least one company, Pepsi, denied to the Times that they were purchasing followers.
Twitter spammers are a making nice profit according Stroppa and De Micheli, who told the paper that, based on their estimated prices, the amount of fake followers on Twitter equaled anywhere from a $40 million to $360 million business.
There are a few Web apps out there that claim to suss out possible fake followers, including Twitter Audit and Status People.
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