14 DAY TRIAL // A large number of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers may very well be fake or, at the very least, don’t really use the service. In fact, about 5 million of his 24.1 million Twitter followers on @realDonaldTrump are “eggs.”
What are these eggs, you ask? Well, when you first make a Twitter account, the default avatar is an egg, because, you know, the site’s logo is a bird. While this isn’t strange when you first start out on Twitter, it is odd to hold that same avatar for long because everyone who creates a social media account seeks to personalize it.
Mashable did an analysis of Trump’s Twitter account with the help of SocialRank, a piece of software used for identifying audiences on the social network.
Out of the 24.1 million Twitter followers on his personal account, Trump has over 5 million followers that have egg avatars. That’s 20% of his following. By comparison, Barack Obama on his @POTUS44 account has 15 million followers, out of which 2.5 million are eggs. At the same time, @HillaryClinton, Trump’s competitor to the White House, has 2.1 million egg followers out of 13 million.
Further data also shows that nearly 4.8 million out of Trump’s followers have never written a tweet. And since his January 20 move to the White House, under 6.5 million of his followers have tweeted.
Lots of Russians and Mexicans among followers
The folks over at Mashable were also interested in other topics regarding Trump’s followers. For instance, out of his bigly Twitter following, over 118,000 live in New York City and over 518,000 in California. Despite his stance on Mexico, over 148,000 people living in this country follow him, as well as over 26,000 Russians. Out of the international accounts following the current US President, over 223,000 have tweeted in Russian and 1.1 million in Spanish.
Just recently, there was a lot of talk that Trump probably cares quite a bit about his Twitter following, especially since he’s such an avid user of the platform. One individual created an account dubbed HalfOnionInABag with the sole purpose of getting more followers than Trump. In less than three weeks, the account managed to gather over 768,000 followers.
“It's ridiculous that I'm about to say this sentence but, a Twitter account that is simply a half an onion in plastic bag getting a lot of attention and gaining a lot of followers at his expense could actually bother the current President of the United States,” the man behind the account told Softpedia.