Up To 46% Of A Brand’s Twitter Followers Are Bots, Says Survey [STUDY]

Twitter has proven itself as a fantastic community-building resource for brands of all shapes and sizes, but new research has suggested that the follower counts of these company profiles might not be as receptive to product and sales messages as their marketers might have hoped.

That is, unless they’re using Twitter to sell oil baths.

Marco Camisani Calzolari, a professor of corporate communications and digital languages at Milan’s IULM University, analysed the Twitter networks of 39 major consumer brands, including Samsung, Starbucks, Blackberry, Wholefoods and Pepsi, and discovered that an alarming number of their followers were provably non-human – that is, bots, or other fake accounts.

And in the case of @DellOutlet, that number was as high as 46 percent.

That’s

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