Donald Trump Had A massive Following Within and Outside United States Even Before He Became President

Salkowitz, R. (2017, January 20). Trump's 20 million Twitter followers get smaller under the microscope. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2017/01/17/trumps-20-million-twitter-followers-get-smaller-under-the-microscope/#7acb07bd4407

In this article, Salkowitz indicates that Donald Trump surpassed the 20 million follower limit on Twitter even before he was sworn into office in late January 2017. According to the author, such a massive number of followers not only increased his popularity but also his social power on the platform. However, a close analysis of Trump’s follower count on Twitter was likely to reveal a good fraction of bots, spam accounts, and dormant users that only serve to inflate the numbers. Besides, the author notes that some of the overseas accounts following Donald Trump may not be legitimately counted as part of his electoral support base. Therefore, if only active domestic Twitter users were to be considered, then Donald Trump 20 million followers would shrink to about 3 million. Hence, the scope of Trump’s audience reach on Twitter was not as broad as he possibly imagined. This article is important because it shows that the follower count metric used in Twitter is not reliable method to gauge the audience reach of a leader in social media.  

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