Twitter – Hide the Twitter followers

Unless twitter makes all the data available to the 3rd party, they will never know about changes that take place between the samples.

For example: if the 3rd party gets the list of users on the first of the month, and compares it to the list on the first of the previous month they can determine the following:

• new followers
• followers that dropped.
• followers that are in both groups.

The 3rd party has no idea if somebody followed you on the 5th, and then dropped you on the 12th.

The more often they sample, the closer they can get to the gross numbers you want. Daily samples are good, but every few minutes would be better.

You're generally right - For the most part, you're looking at completely 'Bot' accounts, particularly for "high quantity purchases". Even though you can usually identify bot accounts, they're almost entirely pointless because they don't do anything. Without actual engaged followers (RTs, @mentions, etc.), the high count does very little.

Lately, there have also been services popping up for 'Getting Paid to Tweet' and follow. For all practical purposes, people can 'rent' their Twitter account to ad agencies to do with what they will - depending on the influence of their Twitter account, it may be slightly more effective, but more than likely just opens the door for the creation and rental of more bots.