Founded in March 2006, Twitter has gained extensive notability and popularity worldwide which makes it the world’s number one micro-blogging platform and been tailing behind rivals Facebook and MySpace in terms of social network websites. Currently, there are close to 20 million users in the United States according to Compete and over 2 billion tweets are posted by Twitterers.
Twitter has experienced exponential growth in the 2007 period and much higher during the later half of 2008 during Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign. Biz Stone, Creative Director of the micro-blogging service and his co-founders should thank several celebrities who have help them garner and attract more users to join the Twitter community. So who are those influential people? Well, let’s check them out…
1. Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte
Without Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte, I think Twitter probably may not even achieve success. Why? First of all, they are both early users of Twitter who have joined the social networking service on January 2007 and April 2007 respectively. What’s more is that Kevin Rose is a web celebrity and also the founder of popular social bookmarking website Digg and Leo Laporte is an American technology broadcaster. Not surprisingly, many of their fans sign up for an account on Twitter and follow them.
2. Blogs and Newspaper Publishing Companies
My friend Zhou Tong and an editor of TechXav said that ‘Twitter is a platform whereby it will benefit both parties’. Basically, it’s known as a cycle that helps Twitter and bloggers gain traffic. When bloggers post their articles on Twitter, other users read it, making it more popular. On the other hand, bloggers write posts about Twitter, singing praises how good the social platform is. Hence, an increasing number of people would visit Twitter.com and set up a profile.
One great example would be Mashable. An influential social media blog, editors at Mashable writes a lot (about 50%) about Twitter. As readers streaming in from organic search results, word of mouth and other social bookmarking websites, they may be curious to find out what Twitter is and what’s so great about it. Hence it results in a spike of growth in Twitter. So as more bloggers especially those who specializes in technology and social media are impressed with Twitter, they would share their thoughts, ideas and opinions. This cycle goes on and the Twitter community becomes larger each day.
Besides blogs, the media also plays a part in boosting up Twitter’s user base. Newspaper publishing and news broadcasting companies such as CNN, New York Times, BCC publish news articles related to the micro-blogging platform to share with their non-technologically-savvy readers that Twitter is actually a really simple website that allows users to relate their daily lives or thoughts with their friends online. Many of these companies even set up Twitter accounts to post breaking news updates. All these free ‘advertisements’ indirectly promotes Twitter to a wide network of people, therefore contributing in Twitter’s exponential growth.
3. Barack Obama
Dubbed as the most technologically-savvy American President in history, Barack Obama tried to attract more fans especially the younger age groups to vote for him during his Presidential campaign last year by joining popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Some says that without the Internet, Obama would not be able to win the election and this statement is pretty true.
Joined Twitter on March 2007, his follower count has increased significantly when the Presidential campaign became hot in mid 2008. At that time, he was ranked the top Twitterer out of an estimated 3 million registered users. On his Twitter profile, he posted stuff mainly regarding his campaign trail. As a Presidential candidate, many people would be very interested in his tweets or updates and of course the word of mouth cycle goes on.
After winning the Presidential election, he ditched Twitter (not completely) and posts one or two important update he wants to convey once in a while. I am pretty sure that if Obama continues to update on a frequent basis, then not only his follower count would be much higher, Twitter would become more popular too.
4. Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey
Currently ranked within the top 5 placings in Twitterholic’s list with about 2 million followers for Ashton Kutcher and 1.3 million followers for Oprah Winfrey. Ashton Kutcher is an American actor and former fashion model whereas Oprah Winfrey is an American media personality, Academy Award nominated actress and producer who has a net worth of over US$2.7 billion.
Just like Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte, both of them are well-known celebrities in the United States and have been in the media spotlight frequently. According to statistics from Alexa and other reliable sources, during Ashton Kutcher’s challenge with CNN of who will reach 1 million followers first and and Oprah Winfrey sending out her first tweet, have clearly shown a peak in growth for the microblogging service.
“It’s a big milestone. This brings Twitter mainstream,” said Andrew Cherwenka, a Huffington Post contributor and Web developer at Trapeze.com, referring to Kutcher and Winfrey’s Twitter breakthroughs. Cherwenka added. “It’s just another stage in Twitter’s acceleration.”
Before Oprah Winfrey posted her first tweet – “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY.”, her follower count hovers at around 73,000. Till date, over 1.3 million users follow read her tweets.
According to several notable bloggers and analysts, they have said that the Oprah and Ashton Kutcher ‘combination’ has contributed a lot to Twitter’s ever-growing reach.
5. Angel Investors
Of course Biz Stone and Co should not forget about Twitter’s angel investors. Twitter has raised US$57 million from venture capitalists. CEO Evan Williams raised about $22 million in venture capital. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions (led by Jeff Bezos of Amazon). Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital backed Twitter in 2009, investing an additional $35 million. On February 13, 2009, Twitter announced on its official blog that it had closed a third round of funding in which it secured more than $35 million.
Just like Google, without these investors, Twitter would not be able to sustain a long term run with no revenue at all.