Find How Many “Eggs” Follow you on Twitter

When you join Twitter, it sets your profile picture as a colored egg but for people to take you seriously, you replace that egg with your face. This is the first rule of the Twitter book but some users aren’t paying attention. Maybe they are too lazy to change the avatar, maybe they want to stay anonymous or maybe they are bots and fake users created by spammers who “sell” Twitter followers.

This week, I set out to count the number of eggs that follow me on Twitter and results were surprising. It turned that out of the 53k users who follow me, around 15% of the followers have eggs as their avatars. Most of these “egg” profiles have never tweeted, their Twitter bio is empty and they have followers in single digit. All big hints that these profile are boosting your “follower” count but not actually reading your tweets.

You can click here to see the full Twitter eggs report.

Find & Remove your Egg Followers from Twitter

If you are curious to know how many eggs follow you on Twitter, here’s a Google Script that will help. It will read your Twitter followers and if any of them have eggs as a profile picture, it will log an entry into a Google Spreadsheet. Here’s how you can get started:

1.  If you are getting an error that “there are currently too many people viewing this file” error, try this mirror.
2. Replace technewsyetu@blogspot.com with your own email address (the report will be sent here) and technewsyetu with your own Twitter handle.
3. Go to the Run menu and choose Step 1 – Authorize. The script will ask for certain permissions and you need to choose Accept  at the authorization prompt.
4. Open the Run menu again and choose Step 2 – Run to initialize the script. That’s it.

You can now close the Google Script window. The script runs in the background and it will send you an email once it has extracted all the eggs from your Twitter account. This is an open-source Google script that uses the Twitter API to get your followers.


Thou shalt not have an egg image as your default avatar in Twitter.

Wondering how the script finds the egg profiles? No, it doesn’t do any magic image matching, it merely looks at the URL of the Twitter avatar – it there’s the word “default” in the URL, it means the underlying image is that of an egg. Simple.