Twitter has been experiencing rapid growth (a staggering 1,300% on a year-to-year basis) and all thanks to the excessive media coverage by CNN, New York Times and even the folks at Forbes has released an article about “Why Celebrities Twitter?“. Besides spreading the word of mouth through these media websites, celebrities also play a part in shaping Twitter to become the world’s most popular micro-blogging platform and within the top 300 most visited website in the world according to the latest Alexa rank.
Currently, there are thousands of celebrities using Twitter out of the 4-5 million Twitter population. Few months ago when I was glancing through the top 100 Twitterers list on Twitterholic, I’ve found out that a majority of them are notable companies such as Starbucks, famous web entrepreneurs and bloggers. However, according to my recent observation and research, an astounding 40% of the top 100 Twitterers in the world based on the number of followers are actually dominated by celebrities whereas the ranks of technology experts and companies are decreasing significantly!
Due to the fact that popular celebrities such as actor and comedian Stephen Fry, basketball player Shaq and seven-time Tour De France champion Lance Armstrong joining Twitter, it seems that the entire list has been re-shuffled and the not-so famous ones were then pushed down tremendously. For example, Kevin Rose was ranked second in the world, tailing behind Barack Obama several months ago. But now he is ranked #12 even though his followers count has boosted by 3 to 4 times.
Despite already having tons of celebrities using Twitter, however, they are still many of them in the world still prefer to create a fan page on Facebook instead of posting updates to followers on Twitter. They include Mr Bean (Rowan Atkinson), Brad Pitt and many more. I believe that there is an increasing number of celebrities signing up for a Twitter account every day and in the months to come, at least 60-70% of them will dominate the top 100 list. Michael Phelps and Steve Jobs currently falls under the top 200 Twitter users group and most likely they will hit the top 100 list soon with an average of 3000 followers increase per day.