Britney Spears and Lady Gaga have more followers than the entire population of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama according to the video Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh) by Socialnomics. Lady Gaga hit the news today as being the most popular tweeter with over 5.7 million followers – go Gaga! I checked these stats last Friday, when Gaga was still approx 100,000 followers behind Britney Spears, which shows the speed at which communities on the social web can grow. Britney has over 5.6 million followers, compared to Ashton Kutcher (third most popular Tweeter) with over 5.5 million followers, however Britney has only posted 439 tweets whereas Ashton is much more in touch with his followers having tweeted 6,111 times!
Ellen DeGenres and Barack Obama are also hot of the heels of Gaga, Britney and Ashton. Here in the UK, it’s Lilly Allen who has the biggest following with over 2 million followers. But does being this popular make them influential?
All of these stats come from the Twittercounter where you can see for yourself the top 1000 most popular Tweeters.
Although these highly popular Tweeters have a massive following, how influential are they? Hewlett-Packard’s Social Computing Lab has developed a system that measures how influential a Tweeter is.
This system measures the number of times a follower clicks on a link or retweets a post by whoever they are following. With a lot of the celebs mentioned above, most Tweets just let their followers know what they are up to from day to day, rather than sharing information and posting opinions that spark discussions. As a result, their influence level is low.
So who are the most influential Twitter users? HP Labs’ released this information a couple of days ago and the results are as follows:-
- @mashable, social media blog
- @jokoanwar, film director Joko Anwar
- @google, google news
- @aplusk, actor Ashton Kutcher
- @syfy, SyFy Channel
- @smashingmag, a web design magazine
- @michellemalkin, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin
- @theonion, satirical news organization The Onion
- @rww, tech blogger Richard MacManus
- @breakingnews, a news aggregator
So if you are not already following them, perhaps you should start – they are obviously doing something right!