Mervyn Barrett OBE, who is running to be police and crime commissioner in Lincolnshire, has a lot of Twitter followers: 17,046, to be precise.
Often, by Barrett’s own admission, it can be “hard to keep track” of all those social media devotees.
But it turns out that such problems are rather new for Barrett, who as recently as 28 June had just 330 followers…
According to Twitter Counter, 29 June was quite a day for the criminal justice guru, whose follower count leapt by a massive 1,667 followers to a total of almost 2,000 (see graph below).
30 June was really good, too, as another 1,668 jumped on board the Mervyn Twitter train, placing his follower count at 3,665. 1 July was also great, as was the 2 July and the 3 July….before things suddenly calmed down on the 9 July, with Barrett at 17,014 followers.
Barrett’s recent huge growth in follower numbers coincides with his plea for campaign funding for his police and crime commissioner bid.
One legal tweeter reckoned this was unfair, telling me: “The importance of that is that he’s now asking for money for his campaign. You may look at his account and think, blimey, he’s got 17k followers so he must be influential/a good egg, so I think it’s disingenuous of him not to get rid of them to show the true state of his influence.”
So far, Barrett hasn’t responded to Legal Cheek’s request for comment. But encouragingly for the companies which sell Twitter followers for as little as £8 per 1,000 followers, his campaign slogan is “expect more”.
In other buying-Twitter-followers news, @LexFuturus‘s over 30,000 followers have dramatically plummeted to a still rather implausible 22,935 since the publication of this article last month.