Some Data on the Top Global Twitter Accounts

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last few years you will know about Twitter, the micro-blogging website which has grown at a tremendous pace since its beginning more than 5 years ago. We would like to share some data with you that has been compiled by Twopcharts, the website that tracks Twitter users in a number of languages and cities, and offers a number of tools relating to Twitter.

It also tracks the Top Global Twitter Accounts, and has been doing this for the last two and a half years. Twopcharts shows that there are now at least 618 Twitter accounts that have more than 1 million followers, and 38 Twitter accounts with more than 5 million followers. Leader of the pack is Lady Gaga who had almost 17 million followere at the time of writing.

The number of followers for the 1,000 most followed accounts is very impressive, with an average number of followers of 1.6 million per account for the group and still 633,000 followers for the number 1,000 global account at this moment. The following graph shows the average amount of followers per 10% group of the top 1,000 Global Twitter accounts:

What you can read in this graph is that for the 7th 10% group, or accounts ranked 601 to 700, the average number of followers per account is just below 1 million, with an amount of about 950 thousand followers.

The average number of new followers was more than 91 thousand per account in December 2011. Where some accounts reached more than 1 million new followers, even the group of accounts ranked between number 900 and 1,000 reached an average amount of new followers of more than 38 thousand followers. The following graph shows the complete overview:

Although the top-100 Global Twitter accounts clearly attract the most new followers, it is obvious from the chart that there is a large group of accounts that add new followers with more than 1,000 new followers per day.

The average number of 91 thousand new followers in the month of November for the total group of Top-1000 accounts compares to an amount of about 40 thousand new followers per account at the end of 2010 and 25 thousand at the end of 2009.

At this moment Twitter is still growing very fast, and is registering more than 800 thousand new accounts per day. Not all of these accounts will convert into active and engaging Twitter users, but it is clear that the success story of Twitter is far from over, and we can expect that follower numbers will keep increasing in the near future, which will keep expanding the reach of individual Twitter users.