Who is the 1% of Twitter, and how would you determine that?

What started as an intellectual exercise or an afternoon curiosity is slowly turning into a research-based passion project. Bear with me while I lay some groundwork.

First, the term “one percent.” The Wall Street Journal estimates that, to be considered in the top 1% of all income earners in the U.S., you need to pull in an annual salary of $506,000. (Sidenote: yeesh.) So, what’s it take to be in the top 1% of all Twitter users, using followers as the corresponding metric to income?

According to Twitter’s blog post celebrating its 6th year anniversary back in March, 2012, the social networking service now has around 140 million users. Here’s where public stats get dicey, as the most recent somewhat reliable data from HubSpot puts the average user with 27 followers, in April 2011 (down from 126 in 2009).  So, what’s the lowest number of followers it takes to be counted among the top 1,400,000,000 users?

Go ahead. I’ll let you ballpark a guess.

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Locked in? Good. Here are my preliminary field notes, as it were:

• My own personal Twitter account has 321 followers, or 12 times as many as the average. So far, I’m looking middle class. According to my Twitalyzer dashboard, however, that puts me in the 46.7th percentile. (The site has done away with most of its free services so I’m limited in what kind of data I can access.) 
• When I compare my account stats from Twitalyzer to what I get from Twitaholic, I see a ranking instead which seems to indicate I’m actually in the top 1% at #444,762nd place.

• Another novelty account I run has just north of 2,000 followers, placing it solidly in the upper class and the 82.1st percentile for Twitalyzer and ranked #94,795th place, either in or out of the 1%.  

• As any upwardly mobile wage earner can tell you, an ocean of wealth separates the top 10% from the top 1%. According to Twitaholic, the top 100 global users by follower runs from Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) at 24,104,421 to Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) at 4,024,166. (Interestingly enough, while typing this post, BET’s 106 & Park (@106andpark) held the #100 spot at 4,023,161 followers and got bumped by Mr. Castaway within the hour.)

This is skewed, though, as metrics like these aren’t collected in realtime. 

• Switch over to another free data site like Twittercounter and find that Hanks is stil holding in #100 but with 4,027,940, while 106 & Park is #99 with 4,028,162.

• Do these services go beyond the top 100 or 1000 elite users? Well, yes and no. Yes, technically Twitaholic will show you a list of the top 1,400,000 users by follower count, which puts @ECWriter of Navarre, FL with 46 followers at the minimum threshold of the top 1%. By following 0 people. And with 0 tweets. Can this metric be anywhere close to accurate? 

• No. We check in with @ECWriter’s profile and see that she is hovering at the 231 followers mark, quite an improvement by comparison to the last time her username was probably crawled by the Twitaholic code. 

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Determining who holds the #1.4m spot is impossible with inaccurate data and tigertongue rough to lick with nothing but access to publicly available Twitter metric tools. What I need is access to the fire hose and a gifted enough programmer to math the rest of this thing out for me, because my initial guess of “1% = 8,000 followers” needs to get sussed out for real.

Sussed, I say!