Top 10 Power Users on Twitter

Twitter is a relatively new player in virtual communication, and the jury is still out on whether it is a marketing tool or a way for peers to communicate. In recent studies and reports, it was found that most Twitter users rarely contribute, posting a tweet an average of once every two and a half months. Another statistic states that the top ten percent of users put out eighty to ninety percent of tweet posts.

As of the end of August 2009, the top 10 powers users on Twitter are:

1. Ashton Kutcher 3.3 million followers
2. Ellen DeGeneres 3 million followers
3. Britney Spears 3 million followers
4. CNN Breaking News 2.7 million followers
5. Twitter 2.2 million followers
6. Ryan Seacrest 2.1 million followers
7. Kim Kardasian 2.1 million followers
8. Oprah Winfrey 2.1 million followers
9. President Barack Obama 2.1 million followers
10. Shaquille O’Neal 2.1 million followers

If Twitter is judged solely by its top users, than it appears it is dominated by people in the entertainment field. Aston Kutcher not only tops the list, but he was also the first person to reach one million followers back in April 2009. And his wife Demi Moore is twelfth on the list with 1.9 million followers. And of the top 10 power users on Twitter, Britney Spears and President Obama have the most friends, each having in the hundreds of thousands while the others had much less, most under one thousand.

One of the reasons that there is a question of the usefulness of Twitter is because many do not understand it’s need. It is often described as a place where people can give up to date information about what they are doing. But most people realize that they are too busy in their own lives to follow every minute of someone else’s.

There are all kinds of tips on how to increase your followers, and one trick is to send out a lot of tweets. While this may work for a news organization like CNN (4th on the list), for most Twitter users a constant flow of posts can come very close to being spamlike. One blogger relates following someone for a weekend and receiving posts constantly, all hyping a post the Tweep had written. The blogger stopped following this person, deciding that this relentless posting, whether from the person or via autobot, was too much.

That is the fine line that Twitter balances on, being an effective two-way communication tool, or becoming as one noted, “a one-way publishing service”.

While it is fun to follow the antics of someone like Ashton Kutcher or Shaquille O’Neal, the average Tweep will need interesting information posted at a pace that doesn’t overwhelm and turn off other Tweeps. Unless they have constantly changing information, like a news source, posters should be careful of the timing of their tweets. And if used as a marketing tool, they must be extra cautious that their promotional tweets are not turned into an automatic bombardment like spam.

3 Responses to “Top 10 Power Users on Twitter”

1. Twitter Trackbacks for Top 10 Power Users on Twitter [webdoctus.com] on Topsy.com says:

   August 31, 2009 at 9:01 am

   [...] Top 10 Power Users on Twitter http://www.webdoctus.com/2009/08/top-10-power-users-on-twitter – view page – cached Twitter is a relatively new player in virtual communication, and the jury is still out on whether it is a marketing tool or a way for peers to communicate. In — From the page [...]

   Reply
2. Forex Trade Signal says:

   January 18, 2010 at 6:15 am

   Oprah is such a great person. Always giving and giving and giving! If only the world was filled with more people as kind spirited as she is.

   Reply
3. Ziya Fortunato says:

   January 29, 2010 at 9:21 am

   Thanks for writing about this. There’s a lot of great tech information on the internet. You’ve got a lot of that info here on your web site. I’m impressed – I try to keep a couple blogs fairly on-going, but it’s a struggle sometimes. You’ve done a big job with this one. How do you do it?

   Reply