Twitter has become a popular social networking tool among artists and celebrities. The more twitter followers you have apparently increases your worth especially among advertisers looking to push a product.  Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber each have close 30 million twitter followers, but how many of them are real?

Almost 70% of Lady Gaga’s twitter followers are fake according to Status People who devised a software tool that divides followers into three categories – the fake, the inactive and the good.

“Katy Perry, Rihanna and Britney Spears each have follower counts in the region of 20million. But Status People’s software suggest that a large proportion of those followers may be imaginary tweeters. Company executive Rob Waller told the Observer: ‘A fake account is set up to follow people or send out spam. They normally have no followers, but follow large numbers of people. ‘An inactive account is one in which there has been no activity for a while. They could be real people, but we would describe them as consumers of information rather than sharers of information.” (Mail Online)

“The tool is intended to expose the true scale of the problem, and it matters because the number of followers a person has can be translated into financial worth by advertisers and marketing companies.”