Twitter Takeaways: Fake Twitter Accounts Inflate Big 12 Teams’ Popularity

Twitter is the most common social media platform for athletes, especially recruits. Because of its popularity, I wrote on how Twitter Followers might correlate with revenue, recruiting rankings, and wins for teams in the Big 12. Unsurprisingly, those results revealed that the @OU_Football Twitter account blew away the competition, with over 520K Twitter followers. The Pokes Twitter account, @CowboyFB, was a lowly 6th place in followers, at 130K.

Some of you may be aware of the “Twitter Bot” controversy from earlier this summer. In July, Twitter removed one million fake Twitter accounts, hoping to rid the social media network of faulty accounts that inflate followings, disrupt “trend” algorithms, and cause unnecessary controversy among actual users. In light of the fake account controversy, I wanted to test the legitimacy of the previous study ranking the Teams’ followings in the conference.

This is where Twitter Audit comes into play. Twitter Audit allows users to see how many of an account’s followers are real compared to how many are fake. For comparison’s sake, here is the OSU Football Account’s Twitter Audit compared to OU’s.

See what Twitter Audit has to say about the legitimacy of each the Big 12 Twitter Accounts, and my 3 takeaways, below:

“Audit Score” = Real Followers/Followers 

1. How about those Sooner fans, or bots?

According to Twitter Audit, the @OU_Football account has 229K fake followers. Almost HALF of the team’s followers do not even exist! This is astounding. Maybe it shouldn’t be, considering it only costs $14 to purchase 1,000 followers. But still. This shows that the gap between OU and Texas in real followers is 148K, compared to the previously identified gap of 321K followers. OU has the second lowest Audit Score at 56%, better than only TCU, who has an embarrassing Audit Score of 54%.

2. That Red Raider Authenticity though

I 100% expected the Kansas State following to be the most genuine. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Bill Snyder had an intern who was hired to personally interact with every single follower on the KState football account. But Kliff Kingsbury’s Red Raiders?? This one surprised me. Maybe I should give the media relations department down in Lubbock some more credit from here on out.

3. OSU is right at average, once again

Once again, the Pokes find themselves in the middle of the road in the conference. This seems to be the theme amongst social media findings thus far. The Pokes are 6th in the number of followers, real followers, and in Audit Score, and 5th in the number of fake followers.