In its September newsletter, Blavo & Co Solicitors professes itself “excited and delighted by our 43,000+ Twitter followers who continue to enhance the way we communicate and exchanged ideas through social media.”
That makes Blavo & Co, a firm with seven offices across London, Hertfordshire and Surrey, Britain’s most popular law firm on Twitter, by far.
We put Blavo & Co’s Twitter account, @legalblavo, through social media monitoring service Twitter Counter, and this is what we found:
Between 26 June and 5 July, Blavo & Co gained a massive 381 followers a day. Then, suddenly Blavo & Co’s Twitter fortunes went into reverse, as the firm inexplicably began losing tens, then hundreds, of followers a day. An odd pattern, indeed.
A scroll through Blavo & Co’s Twitter followers reveals that the vast majority are fake accounts like this one.
The number of websites selling fake Twitter followers has proliferated recently, with 1,000 followers costing as little as £8. Followers are typically bought for your own account, although there have been instances of high profile individuals having fake followers bought for them without their consent.
Blavo & Co has not responded to Legal Cheek‘s request for comment.
The firm is by no means the only member of the legal community to have been caught up in Twitter follower controversy of late. Last month, London barristers’ chambers 4 Breams Buildings deleted its Twitter account after Legal Cheek revealed that most of its 15,000 followers were fake. Meanwhile, in July we reported on the dramatic decline in Twitter followers of celebrity lawyer Dean Dunham, who once boasted over 70,000 devotees.