Ohio State touts football coach's million Twitter followers, more than half of which are apparently fake
Urban Meyer is the "first coach in football to reach 1 million followers on @twitter," Ohio State blasted out to the world via -- what else? -- Twitter on Sunday afternoon.
"NO fan base better than #BuckeyeNation!"
Meyer followed that up with a tweet of his own, reading in part: "The BEST fans in the land!! Thank you Buckeye Nation!"
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It was quickly revealed, however, that more than half of Meyer's million followers appear to be fake. Either that, or a disproportionate number of eggs love Ohio State football.
We ran Meyer's account through the online service Twitter Audit, which revealed something interesting: He apparently has just over 400,000 real followers, and just under 600,000 fake followers.
This is, to use a sports-ball reference, not a winning record.
But Meyer's not alone -- and now our story takes another funny turn.
Ohio State and Michigan are big-time college football rivals. Meyer and Michigan's coach, Jim Harbaugh, love to snipe at each other in interviews. It's all pretty entertaining to follow.
Shortly after Meyer passed a million followers, as many bloggers and fans pointed out, Harbaugh hit the same milestone. But subsequent reports reveal Harbaugh to have about the same ratio of fake-to-real-followers as his coaching rival.
Here's a look at Meyer's most recent followers, as visualized at the time of this writing.
And now here's the same for Harbaugh.
Now, is Easter coming twice this year? Because that's a whole lot of eggs. (And ba-dum-tss, goes our drummer.)
Meyer and Harbaugh aren't alone in being big sports names with a lot of fake followers, of course -- and the same can be said for popular accounts in politics, entertainment and beyond. Still, a pretty funny twist, given Ohio State trumpeting Meyer's milestone on Sunday and Harbaugh quickly catching up.
The lesson, as always, dear readers: Social media and real life are not the same thing. Not even close.
Topics X/Twitter
Sam Laird is Mashable's Senior Sports Reporter. He covers the wide, weird world of sports from all angles -- as well as occasional other topics -- from Mashable's San Francisco bureau. Before joining Mashable in November 2011, his freelance work appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Slam, and East Bay Express. Sam is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and basketball and burritos take up most of his spare time. Follow him on Twitter @samcmlaird.
