Analysis: Top 100 Twitter Users
Written by Glen, this post has 24 Comments
In terms of traffic, I feel like Twitter is becoming a sort of hybrid between Digg of a few years ago and StumbleUpon. By Digg I mean that thousands of blogs are now including “Tweet this” buttons (just like they were with “Digg It” buttons) and like StumbleUpon, Twitter has the ability to send thousands of visitors in a short period of time.
My friend Gyutae managed to leverage over 35,000 hits in two weeks and I know blogs like TheNextWeb have reported over 250,000 visitors per month from the service in their stats. That’s a lot of traffic.
While getting a huge amount of retweets is one way to get twitter eyeballs on your content, there is another way. And that way, is by having a lot of followers on your account. My personal account only has around 10,000 followers but I’ve had many days of 400+ visitors from the service.
Because I’m often referred to as “Mr. Analytics” I decided it would be interesting to dig further into the statistics of the top 100 users and see if there are any clear factors about what it takes to become a top user or who stands out among the many celebrities using the service.
Number of Followers
Now the reason top users are referred to as such is because of the number of followers that their account has. This is simply people who have clicked ‘follow’ on their profiles and subscribed to their updates. This is probably the only graph in the post that is going to follow a nice gradual direction:
- Most followers: 3,830,056 (@aplusk – Ashton Kutcher)
- Least followers: 1,236,521 (@samantharonson – Samantha Ronson)
- Average number of followers: 1,637,361
As you can see from the chart, there is a clear separation between the top 15 or so users and then the following 85 tend to have very similar numbers. Many of the top 100 positions change on a daily basis because the figures are so close.
Number of Friends
The number of friends section looks at how many people that these top users follow. For most accounts I see, people have around a 1:4 ratio. That means if they were followed by 100 people, they would probably be following around 25. As you will see for most of the top users though, that is far from the case:
- Most friends: 753,958 (@barackobama – Barack Obama)
- Least friends: 0 (@womensweardaily – Womens Wear Daily)
- Average number of friends: 39,754
Most of the top users follow so few accounts that you can barely see them on the chart. While the president of the United States follows more people back than anyone else, Zappos and Whole Foods follow the largest percentage of people that follow them.
Number of Updates
The number of updates is how many tweets each user has sent out. Some of these are automated through RSS feeds (such as @Nytimes) and others are personal tweets, such as Shaquille O’neill (@THE_REAL_SHAQ).
- Most updates: 37,297 (@Nytimes – New York Times)
- Least updates: 14 (@ashsimpsonwents – Ashlee Simpson Wentz)
- Average number of updates: 3,545
It must be nice to have over 1.7 million followers when you have only made 14 tweets. I guess that just shows how passionate Ashlee Simpson fans are. Close to her was Oprah, who with only 72 tweets, has 2.4 million followers. But hey, it’s Oprah!
Length of Membership
The longest person who has been on Twitter in the top 100 users is of course co founder Biz Stone who has been on the service for 44 months. Besides that, I thought it would be interesting to see how long (or short) the top users have been members of the service:
- Longest membership: 36 months (@Veronica – Veronica Belmont)
- Shortest membership: 7 months (@kimkardashian – Kim Kardashian, @ashsimpsonwentz – Ashlee Simpson, @peoplemag – People Magazine), @serenajwillians – Serena Williams)
- Average membership length: 18 months
As you can see, there is no clear correlation between length of time on the site and how many followers that you have. In fact, Ashton Kutcher has only been on the site for half of the average time and is 300,000 subscribers ahead of second place.
Type of Account
Finally, I thought it would be interesting to see how many of the Top 100 accounts were individuals, and how many of the top 100 accounts were some form of business. I expected there to be a lot more individuals than companies. I was right about this, but the two figures were closer than I thought:
- Number of people: 66
- Number of companies: 34
- Most popular person: Ashton Kutcher
- Most popular business: CNN Breaking News
In fourth place, CNN breaking news is by far the most popular non-individual on the service with a whopping 2.78million followers.
Summary
As you can probably tell, the top individuals are generally celebrities. They tend to be people who have acceled in areas of acting, music, or sports. For the few people who aren’t world-known celebrities, they tend to be well known in the tech industry. For example, @Veronica (Veronica Belmont) hosts a show via Revision 3 which was created by Digg founder, Kevin Rose.
All in all, the aim of this analysis was to simply look at the results and see what interesting factors popped up. I think I’ve managed to achieve that and I hope you enjoyed the post!
Thank you, these stats sre always interesting! How about top 100 I different fields, ie: top 100 real estate sites.
I’ll consider doing something like that in the future, thanks!
sexy graphs.
looks like this is gonna be the TAKEOVER. supr exctd.
looking super lava slick.
total domination baby.
Haha, thanks bro!
Nice to see your new website Glen!
@Alex, I always find some difficulty reading your comments
Thanks Oscar,
Yeah, that’s probably because Alex is insane.
I doubt there are many on the top users list who aren’t on the suggested users list provided by Twitter, and they are randomly added to all new Twitter accounts.
How long someone has been on the suggestion list highly influences how many followers they now have.
I don’t think any serious conclusions can be drawn from the data
That is a great point Andy and something I should have looked at further. I’m pretty sure some of the people high up on the list (Oprah) aren’t actually suggested users though.
Thanks for stopping by!
Great post Glen. I am also really interested in your little “please share on Twitter” button at the bottom of your post. What service are you using for that? I RT’d it (both because your post deserves it, and to see how it looked on my Twitter account). Wondering where the RT gets the exact 140 characters it uses.
Thanks!
Hi Neil,
I’m not using any service for that, I coded it myself (yes, g33k). Can you explain what you mean by the last sentence? Which 140 exact characters?
Thanks for the explanation — I get it. Don’t worry about the 140 character thing — just my confusion! I see what you did.
Neil
[...] Tweets about this great post on TwittLink.com [...]
I particularly liked the section – “Type of Accounts”. The analysis for which clearly shows that the corporate accounts are still yet to outbeat the people accounts.
Anyways, a great post.
Keep the momentum going!
Thanks man, hope to see you back here soon.
I always find some difficulty reading your comments
Thanks for the list. It’s give some benefit for us
Hello Glen
I happened by chance upon your blog and I found it very interesting, congratulations! Excuse my English, I live in Italy and I’m Romanian:-P I’ll come find you!
Hiya – I stumbled on this oage by mistake. I was searching in Google for Registry software that I had already purchased when I found your site, I must say your site is pretty cool I just love the theme, its amazing!. I don’t have the time this minute to totally read your entire site but I have bookmarked it and also signed up for your RSS feed. I’ll back in a day or two. thanks for a great site.
This is really neat Glen. I really enjoy Twitter. Thanks for taking the time to get analytical with it!
Hello I am so delighted I found your blog, I really found you by mistake, while I was looking on Yahoo for something else, Anyways I am here now and would just like to say thanks for a tremendous post and a all round entertaining blog (I also love the theme/design), I don
I was wanting to know if I could talk to you about your site you just sold, I noticed it was for sale again and wanted to talk to you about buying it and looking for some coaching and mentoring and was wondering if your services were available. I would like to discuss a month to month program. Not sure if you do this but I was very impressed with what you have done on line and you come across to be very focused and helpful, please forward your contact info so I can skype you at a time that works for you,so we can talk or your land line my skype is alwaysmoving99 and you have my email and site info.
Thank-you in advance, wanting to learn from the right people, there is so much out there,just looking for proper direction.
Best Regards
Todd Bossie
Added you to Skype.
Hey, just out of curiosity I tried to find my age on Twitter and looks like I am using Twitter earlier than @Veronica. I joined in July 2006, she joined in October. My Twitter handle is @palewar. Can you please verify and include myname in list, will be good for some Twitter ego of mine
Thanks for the hard work here Glen!