• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, December 6, 2012

Authenticity reigns supreme in social media marketing, or at least it should -- which is why Socialbakers has created a new “Fake Followers” tool to figure out how many of your Twitter followers are fake (or simply inactive).

As Socialbakers notes, fake followers can ruin a brand’s reputation and decrease engagement, not to mention spam your news feed with scams and all manner of unwanted content. To rid your Twitter feed of this scourge, Socialbakers came up with telltale signs to determine fake or “empty” followers, including: the ratio of following to followers is less than 50 following to one follower; repeated use of phrases like “diet,” “make money,” and “work from home;” tweets repeated more than three times; and more than 90% of the account’s tweets are retweets.

Inactive followers are identified as those with only one or two retweets on profile, or one where the last tweet is older than 3 months.

The tool can be applied to any Twitter handle, so social media marketers can use it to see if competitors are, say, boosting their following with fake followers.

According to Socialbakers, a fake score of 10% or less means your following is basically legitimate; 20%-40% warrants a review of followers to determine whether they’re real; and 50%-70% is a red flag. Socialbakers recommends trying to establish a dialogue with potentially fake followers to see if they’re legit.