She has no bio, no profile image, she follows no one, and has never posted a single Tweet. Still, more than 23,000 people follow her on Twitter with an average of 19 new followers each day. Tina Fey doesn’t use Twitter, but no one seems to mind.

For a brief period, someone was using that account to Tweet as TinaFey, but after Fey herself acknowledged she wasn’t the one doing it, the account was reset, with all of the Tweets and profile information removed. Maybe some fans were duped when they thought it was Fey herself dispensing such nuggets as:

“Somewhere a man named Barack Obama sits on a toilet and thinks the same thing I do: I need to trim my toe nails.”

(That was one of the better ones. Most of the imposters posts were clunkers such as “My aborted fetus knows more about economic policy than John McCain.”)

More than 8,000 of @TinaFey’s 23,000+ followers signed up when the Fake Fey (TM – all rights reserved) was active, but that still doesn’t explain the fifteen thousand more that followed since the account was wiped clean. I wanted to know why, so I asked some of them.

@LiseyCo responded, “well I’m not entirely sure it’s even the real Tina fey first off. But Tina fey inspires me. She is an amazing woman…”

That sums it up well. There’s no drawback to following an empty profile on Twitter. The upside, I guess, is that if Tina Fey ever does start Tweeting, these people will be the first to see it and their lives will somehow be enriched? That’s almost exactly what @rdavidphotoDC said, “ I suppose so that if the real Tina Fey ever decides to say anything I will be among the first 23,000 to know.”

Looking at my 370 followers (and paucity of Emmy awards), someone might accuse me of sour grapes. Not so. I have no desire for everything that comes with that level of fame. However, I remain amazed at how her name alone can attract substantially more followers than the average Twitter user.

As it turns our though, not even Tina Fey’s name can compete with Fake Fey. After getting the boot and leaving his 8,239 followers behind, Fake Fey went on to start the Twitter account, @NotTinaFey. Exactly 53 Tweets later (and Fake Fey himself hasn’t posted since August of 2009) NotTinaFey’s follower count stands at 372,307. Not so shabby for a guy who started off pretending to be a girl who wasn’t on Twitter to begin with anyway only to later admit that he wasn’t Tina Fey. Maybe. I just lost track.

So click away, America! Someday Tina Fey, the real Tina Fey, will Tweet and you can say you were there when those first 140 characters of wisdom came down. You, and 23,242 of your friends.