Spam sucks. It makes it that much harder to really connect to your tribe on social media. There is, however, a great big bot free light at the end of the tunnel. Recently, Emilio Ferrara and pals at Indiana University in Bloomington, have developed a way to spot sophisticated social bots and distinguish them from all of the rest of us, oh so human, users. Woo!! How is this great news for you?
These researchers have created an algorithm called Bot or Not? to mine this data, looking for significant differences between the properties of human users and social bots. The algorithm looked at more than 1,000 features associated with outed bot accounts, such as the number of tweets and retweets each posted, the number of replies, mentions and retweets each received, the username length and even the age of the account.
The good news is that there are significant differences between human accounts and bot accounts. Bots tend to retweet far more often than humans and they also have longer usernames and younger accounts. By contrast, humans receive more replies, mentions and retweets. Your goal is to interact and get social. To build your brand in an authentic way, you focus your attention on the real live people on the other end of that.
I know you want to go and take a little look-see. Lucky for us, Ferrara and co have made their Bot or Not? algorithm available here. All you have to do is enter the screen name of the Twitter user and it will analyze its features and most recent posts to determine the likelihood of it being a social bot.
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