Data Analysis of Top 1000 Twitter Users: Five Simple Rules from Twitter Rockstars
Who has more followers? Who’s been out there the longest? Who tweets more? We dug into the numbers and came out with a data-driven guide to upping your odds for attaining legendary status on Twitter.
The Fine Print: This Silk visualizes statistics on the Top 1000 Twitter Accounts with the most followers. We used some web scraping cleverness to download it into a CSV. Then we quickly converted it into a Silk. (Data last updated on March 23rd, 2015.) Alice Corona did the data analysis and visualizations. Me (Alex Salkever) wrote the post. Together, we provide Twitter aspirants a basic (not so serious) guide and analysis of how to up your chances of being a Big Deal on Twitter. Henceforth…..
Rule 1: It’s Better to Be An Actual Rockstar Than to Be President. Although Not Always.
Katy Perry and Justin Bieber have more followers than Obama. Katy Perry has 11 million followers more than the U.S. President. That’s despite the fact that El Presidente has been on Twitter for two years longer than Perry. But Obama does top Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Justin Timberlake in total followers.
Rule 2: Move to LA, NY, or London. Definitely Leave California, Though.
In California in general and San Francisco, the ground is not fertile for Twitter stars. Of the top 1000 Twitter accounts with the most followers, 581 specify a location. Even though Twitter is headquartered in San Francisco and was born there, the City by the Bay comes in way behind other major metros when it comes to number of Twitter rockstars.
Rule 3: Tweet from a Country Where You Speak English, Portuguese or Spanish.
In terms of countries, most of the top accounts are in English speaking countries. The U.S. alone has about one-fourth of the Top 1000. Brazil also does surprisingly well. Mexico and Spain are in the Top 5.
Rule 4: Don’t Follow Others on Twitter
Accounts with the most followers don’t follow back much. Generally speaking, Twitter superstars don’t like to follow. Three U.S. exceptions are Yoko Ono, Barack Obama and Britney Spears (there are several outliers from Middle East on the chart, as well). Former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is also notable for following hundreds of thousands of people (hard to understand where he finds the time). This image of our scatter plot shows the strong bias of low following behavior to people who are heavily followed.
Rule 5: Tweet Sparingly. It Makes You Cooler.
The most popular folks on Twitter added the most followers per month while Tweeting the least number of updates. Sometimes less is more. You don’t really have to tweet too much get people to follow you. Actually, account holders who post more updates are more likely to have less followers. The scatter plot above shows the strong concentration of high followers and low-volume tweeters.
To do the very first quick analysis took almost no time at all. By filtering down the Twitaholic data more precisely in Silk, you could also build industry specific views and even do some targeting of best Twitter Rockstars to target for engagement. And with Silk’s dynamic pinning, you can convert the Twitter URL or Twitter handle of each Rockstar in our database into a live Twitter stream.
We hope you like our post today although, of course, you understand we’re not entirely serious. Let us know what you think…on Twitter, of course. We are @SilkDotCo.
Originally published at blog.silk.co.
