Serendipity35

This month Twitter started removing tens of millions of suspicious accounts, especially those that are identified as bots and fake accounts.

That means that users may be finding that they have lost followers.  Of course, if you were a user who inflated your followers by buying followers, I'm glad your numbers dropped. And if I lost a few who were fake, all the better.

Twitter declined to provide an exact number of affected users, but said it would drop tens of millions of questionable accounts and that would reduce the total combined follower count on Twitter by about 6 percent.

Full disclosure - I own Twitter stock and though I don't want to see the stock drop, I do want reform. Twitter has far fewer users than Facebook or Google, but has also come in for criticism for allowing abuse and hate speech and for playing a role in the Russian influence during the 2016 election.

Twitter did not turn a profit until the final quarter of last year, and Twitter Inc.'s stock slipped 10% last week after the news about the suspended accounts came out. Those accounts impact the company's tally of monthly active users, a key growth metric that is closely monitored by Wall Street investors. The MAU (monthly active users) jumped to 336 million in April, up from 330 million in the previous quarter.

I have always told my social media clients that followers is not the best metric to measure the success of your social media strategy. Everyone wants followers, but I get new followers every day on multiple networks that I can see are only following me in the hopes that I will follow them back. 

As others have observed -

Removing bots enables Twitter to take control of this situation, and improve the credibility of their metrics – as social media marketing becomes a more significant element in modern business, people are also becoming more informed about what those numbers actually mean, and how to identify real influence, as opposed to those who’ve bought their way to prominence.

If people repeatedly see influencer lists filled with people who they know have cheated the system, that reduces their trust in such data, while it would also skew Twitter’s algorithm which favors content from more prominent users, and with higher engagement stats (both of which can be gamed).