The world in the eyes of Twitter statistics

Being a data-loving nosy parker, one of my biggest Internet sins is to get caught up in looking at statistics on various things - some good, some dubious - including of course statistics showing patterns of Internet use.

There are many great sites for this, one such being Social Bakers. Here I was looking at some of the Twitter stats today.

I had really been looking for usage numbers by country having found some - rather dubious - ones on another website yesterday. But, instead, the Twitter statistics here take a slightly different angle and instead of user numbers per country focus more on giving details on accounts, brands, and media with high numbers of Twitter followers.

And looking at this makes your mind boggle. Worth a look in particular is the section on top twitter accountstwitter accounts andtop twitter brands:

The three top Twitter accounts are Lady Gaga, followed by Justin Bieber, followed by Barrack Obama. Hmm, so this is what makes the world tick. What an interesting reflection of popular topics and figures of public interest today! I love looking at data like this and what they tell us about the current Zeitgeist. Another (now somewhat out-of-date, yet still) interesting treasure in terms of looking at the world reflected in users online behaviour is of course Bill Tancer's book Click: What millions of people are doing online and why it matters. Certainly an enjoyable and recommended read.


But let's not divert and instead take a look at the top brands listed here for Twitter! Number one here is Charity Water, that is the brand of a non-profit organization for bringing clean and safe drinking water to the people of the developing nations.

Of course, water is a critical resource impacting the life and quality of life of milions of people and there is no doubt that this brand deserves a top position. But who would have thought a charity brand can make it to the top ?! It goes to show the power of the Internet as an enabler of non-mainstream views, businesses, and topics, great !



And where, I am wondering, in this list of Twitter top brands is the usual top brand trio of Coca-Cola, IBM, and Microsoft ?? Not sure, but neither of them appears in the top 21 shown on the first page and I am not checking further right now.