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Which Surf Mag Has The Most Fake Twitter Followers?

I noticed an interesting post on Mashable this morning about fake Twitter followers.

Apparently you can bulk purchase followers. A pointless endeavour as whilst you get a healthy looking follower count you don't get any engagement from the bot/dead/ghost accounts.

The post has an interesting graphic on the celebs stats. Which got me thinking about the surf mags.

So I inputted my own account and the main surf mag accounts into Faker to see what popped out. This is the result. Whilst Inactive accounts aren't of much interest as they are real people that haven't used their account/or only use it to read others tweets. The Good percentage is interesting as these are the people that can actually engage with you and your content. Carve and SurfEurope tie for the lead on 75% (my personal acct is included for comparison on 85%).

The Fake figure is the telling number. Now we all get bot followers, spam followers and crap like that, it's unavoidable. You can see the range (numerical stats after the jump) is from 3% to 8% for all the main mags ... 

Apart from the winner.

Which has a massive 32% of fake followers. Somewhere in the region of 2033 fake accounts.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the results.

The 'Shhhh! It's A Secret' Pie Chart...

We gave 6,969 people a simple survey* to gain their views on what they considered to be a true secret spot. All they had to do was tick the box they agreed with most. This is their response in yummy pie form.

*Not really.

Surf Mag Social Media Stats... Or An Excuse For A Nice Graph

**UPDATE** Have updated the figures for today as the nice chaps at OnFire mag pointed out that I'd used SurfPortugal's 'friend' tally not Fan Page tally (mainly cos I could not find the Surf Portugal Fan page originally) so I have rejigged the numbers (only counting Fan Page stats as brands using personal pages is against FB rules) which flips positions with the Portuguese mags. I've also added Fluir the Brazilian mag and SurfGirl. I'll be updating it every month so we can see who is kicking online ass and who is being a lazy bum.

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Original Post...
I was wondering the other afternoon how the world's surf mag's stacked up socially.

Not an every day thought for most people but there you go.

So I did a little Interweb half-marathon to crawl the numbers. 

So here you go: the surf mag's social reach, from a purely Twitter and Facebook point of view, I'm not tallying G+, Instagram or others as most surf mags are pretty slow on the uptake of the paradigm shift in tech and aren't utilising these services, G+ uptake is woeful, which considering how Google are skewing search to favour its own network needs looking at.

Understandably the US mags blow everyone elses doors off, but you'd expect that as they have global reach and a huge national audience.

Aside from the big three of ER/ING/TWS in the next tier down, the group I'll be calling the  10-30Gs Club it's Fluir and Australia's Surfing Life that are kicking social ass, with a healthy balance of TW and FB fans. Surf Session the sole remaining French title is weak on Twitter, probably due to the language barrier and huge on FB- might be wise to think of the quote involving 'eggs and baskets' here. As anyone that remembers MySpace will agree, and with FB bringing in the unpopular Timeline who knows what the future holds.

Carve (where I work) holds its own with the rest of the Aussie titles in the 15,000+ club with the below 7,500 fans list showing either smaller titles or magazines that were late to the online party.

You might laugh but plenty of magazine editors 'didn't see the need' for a FB or Twitter account...

Sure it means sod all when it comes to actual surfing in the real world but when it comes to brand awareness and the key reason for it all –selling magazines– it's interesting to see how things stand.

There's a grab of the actual numbers after the jump y'all...

The "You Are A Nazi" Pie Chart...

We surveyed 736.2 people and asked them if they ever spent time arguing, bitching, sniping and calling people Nazis for disagreeing with them and worse on Interweb surf forums. 

These are are the results: