MORE than half of Twitter fans of Rangers are fake, it has emerged.

 

The Scottish championship side has 160,000 followers on the social media site, making it one of the country's biggest institutions on the microblogging site.

However, an analysis shows 51% are "suspicious or empty", 17% are inactive and just 32% are ranked "good".

The Fake Followers app from Social Bakers - which has already been used to show that Alex Salmond has more fake followers than any other British politician - also revealed huge numbers of doubtful followers at other clubs.

Celtic has 250,000 followers on Twitter, but 36% of them are fake, according to Social Bakers, and 15% meaning only 46% are "good".

Current league leaders Aberdeen has fewer followers than both the big Glasgow teams, just 36,000. But more than half of them are real and just 36% are fake.

Scammers creating fake accounts regularly follow big names in order to make their creations - which sell for about £5 for 10,000 - look more real.

That is why Mr Salmond has 40% of his followers who are under question - in fact Barack Obama, the most followed politician in the world, has tens of millions of fakes apparently signing up to hear his tweets of wisdom.

Social media consultant Annie McGuire said: "Fake followers aren't really going to concern politicians and clubs too much.

"There's absolutely no suggestion they went out to acquire them - and it's really just an indication that they are 'twitter famous' - worth following to make your own account look credible.

"It's more of a problem for the beleaguered 'social media manager' within big companies who have promised their bosses their message is getting to 100k people... when in fact a closer look at those followers shows as many as half may be 'bots'.

"It's worth remembering that social media is not real life though.

"Even 'real people' on Twitter are pretty fake in how they behave: they follow people they despise and they retweet things they don't agree with to start a fight. If you behaved like that in the pub you'd get thrown out."