Billy Tompson: Twitter celebrates #5yrs since the first tweet: who are the most-followed users?

Monday, March 21, 2011

Twitter celebrates #5yrs since the first tweet: who are the most-followed users?

Twitter has marked the fifth anniversary of the first tweet today . Who are the most influential tweeters and which countries are the biggest users?
? Get the data

Twitter celebrated five years of tweeting today, very aptly creating a #5yrs tag to observe the day.

Co-founder Jack Dorsey was the first person to send a tweet on 21st March 2006 and since then billions of twitter updates have flooded the social networking site. The 140- character updates have attracted celebrities, politicians and sport stars over the years and now over 140 million tweets are published a day.

Twitter has also been seen as an influential source of up-to the minute news in a world of 24 hour news updates. The growth of the social networking tool has been prevalent in a series of high-profile stories from the student tuition fee protests to the recent earthquake in Japan.

With data from the Sysomos - the publishers of an In- depth look inside the Twitter world and from Twitter Counter we have pulled together a mixture of figures on the birthday site.

Using Twitter Counter, we have collected the top 100 most followed users. The counter is updated daily so the rankings may differ but the top tweeters usually only shift a few places. With data from Sysomos we have looked at which cities and age groups have the most users. So what does this data tell us?

? Lady Gaga has the most popular account on Twitter with 8,914,965 followers. Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Barack Obama and Kim Kardashian also make the top five most followed list
? The USA account for more than half of all twitter users with 62% coming from the states. The UK, Canada, Australia and Brazil are the next big users
? Twitter proves to be most popular for 20-24 year old's as they account for 35% of all users
? Musicians are a big majority of the top 100 most followed users. Politicians, comedians, tv hosts, actor/actresses and sport stars attract big followers too

The table below shows the top 100 most followed users and our spreadsheet shows a collection of figures on cities with the biggest percentage growth as well as users by age group and country. What can you do with this data?