Our Twitter Tracker is an awesome tool to get insights in stats and sentiment from an event or topic on Twitter. To show you the power and the possibilities of the tool we tracked Apple’s #WWDC from last Monday.

Apple uses the WWDC event to announce new features on Apple products and to announces it’s newest products, like the iPhone and the iPad in preceding years. Because these announcements are always discussed vigoursly on Twitter, it makes a great case for our Twitter Tracker.

So let’s have a look at the stats:

On the days leading up to the WWDC event and the day itself a total of 175.155 tweets were posted with the hashtag #WWDC. The peak was 301 tweets per minute, that’s 5 tweets per second!
The peak of the actvity was around 12.00 a.m. PDT. This is the moment that Apple unveiled the new streaming music service, iTunes Radio which is build into the new iOS 7 operating system.

The tracker also allows you to analyze the sentiment of the tweets around any given topic. In the case of WWDC it showed us that of all tweets 82% was positive. When zoom in we notice that Twitter users are mostly positive about iOS 7 and the new OS X Mavericks. The other 18% (negative tweets) was not impressed by the announcements or believed that Apple copied features from Android and were quite vocal about it.

Check out our WWDC Twitter Tracker here or click on the graph below.

What do you think of Apple’s announcements on this year WWDC? Let us know in the comments.

For websites that offer a service (like ours), it’s important you get mentioned in publications and show practical examples of your services to a bigger and newer audience than your current users. It’s good for branding and strengthens your authority.

In this blogpost we want to share what happened last week when we reported on Justin Bieber passing Lady Gaga as the most followed Twitter user and how we got covered by some major news outlets. These included CNN, Reuters, Huffington Post, Mashable, CNET, Yahoo, MTV and Billboard.com (see the articles here).

Predict the future
Thanks to our prediction tool and investigative curiosity we found out that Justin Bieber was closing in on Lady Gaga who had been the most followed user on Twitter since August 2010. We determined that Justin Bieber would pass Lady Gaga in around five days so we created an early online press release that was optimized for social media with Pressdoc.com. (Like Twitter Counter, Pressdoc is another TNW Labs product)

Tip insiders
We wanted to give some websites an exclusive tip in the early stages of a (possible) news item and also give them the time to write up a good story and get it ready to be published. So we sent this press release to 20 journalists under an embargo, 5 days before Justin Bieber would pass Lady Gaga. These journalists are on our press list to receive special news tips that are related to Twitter stats.

Don’t push rocks, roll snowballs
Some journalists reported back to us and thanked us for the tip, others didn’t find it that interesting to publish (but hey! that’s the name of the game!). Of course our goal was to be the first with this prediction and try to break the news before the majority would pick up this story. By now, we knew our “news ball” was in effect and with a few journalists in the loop we released a blogpost with the news only 2 days before Justin Bieber was likely to pass Lady Gaga.

We spread the news via our Twitter account, also mentioned it in our weekly newsletter and when some websites started publishing it we saw the ball was really rolling. After Reuters picked it up we saw a tipping point and after that, more major websites picked up our prediction and mentioned it (AND us) in their posts.

So that’s how we got some nice coverage on something we discovered using our own tools! The end result? Over a 6 day period we received almost 50.000 more pageviews than we normally get in the same timespan.

Want to be on Twitter Counter’s press list? E-mail your credentials to: rey@twittercounter.com

This blogpost was written by Twitter Counter’s co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (@Boris).
As a platinum Twitter user (he joined as user #17463) he has compiled a list of tips for you to get ahead on Twitter in 2013.
Be sure to also check out this blogpost with 5 tips on keeping your followers engaged in 2013!

Hi there,

It is a brand new year and we finally got over our hangovers here at Twitter Counter so we decided to wish you a happy new year and give you a few tips on how to get the most out of Twitter in 2013. As you might know Twitter is still growing strong with millions and millions of new users, and potential new followers for you, joining every day. Are you making the most of your online presence? Is your profile up-to-date? Here are ten tips that will help you plan for the rest of 2013:

1: Check your password
That password you’ve signed up with a Twitter 4 years ago and never changed? Yeah, now would be an excellent moment to change that. Security is getting more and more important these days.

Bonus tip: want to know if your password is secure? test it at http://howsecureismypassword.net

2: Change your looks
Don’t get us wrong, you look AWESOME today! It is just that your profile reminds us of Geocities homepages. It really doesn’t hurt to change your Twitter design every other year or so. Here is a direct link to the Twitter settings: https://twitter.com/settings/design

Bonus tip: sign-up for a Kuvva account and then head to the settings to connect your Twitter Account so Kuvva can add beautiful artwork to your background design at Twitter: http://www.kuvva.com/

3: Rewrite your profile
You probably still worked at your previous company when you wrote that personal description and your URL still points to your Myspace profile? Or maybe you’ve updated it yesterday? Either way, take another good look and make sure you are properly representing yourself or your brand: https://twitter.com/settings/profile

Bonus tip: on that same page you can choose to connect your Twitter account to your Facebook account. Could be an easy way to kill two birds with one stone. Or more correctly; post to two networks with one update.

4: Make new friends, forget old friends
We all focus on new followers and that is fine. But as Churchill said ‘We make a living by how many followers we have, we make a life by who we follow’ or something like that. This might be a good moment to check out who you are following, unfollow a few boring people and replace them with some new friends! https://twitter.com/following

Bonus tip: to see if you have a healthy follower/following ratio run your Twitter handle through out profile check: http://twittercounter.com/pages/account_check

5: Get an app
A lot of people still use the web interface, and not that there is ANYTHING wrong with that, but you might want to get more pleasure from using a dedicated app for your computer, tablet or phone. I use TweetDeck on the Mac and the official Twitter app for my iPhone and iPad. I hear great stories about MetroTwit for Windows 8 and Echofon for Android.

Bonus tip: If you want to get even more professional about your tools check out Hootsuite for group based tweet account management and Bufferapp.com for scheduling tweets. I pay for both tools and love them!

6: Go Pro
Twitter is all fun and games except when you are serious about your (personal) brand. And if you are, you want statistics to back up your theories about what works and what doesn’t. So why not treat yourself to a Premium or Pro account at Twitter Counter? You know you are worth it!

Bonus tip: As a co-founder I can sometimes give away some nice goodies So if you decide to signup for a new Pro Twitter Stats subscription you will see a nice little discount (40% off on the first month) at the end of the signup process via this link.

(Not valid with other discount offers or with subscription packages)

7: Disconnect 15 apps
Okay, maybe 15 is too much, but browse over to your Apps settings at Twitter and check how many apps you have given permission to do basically everything they want on your account. Some might still be relevant (Like Twitter Counter, don’t delete that one!) but there might be a few you tested once and never used again. Might as well disconnect those. https://twitter.com/settings/applications

Bonus tip: you can’t revoke access for iOS apps from that page, but it does help to go through them to see which apps you’ve given permission to and maybe double check those on your devices.

8: Get a Bitly account for better link stats
Twitter automatically shortens URLs for you when you compose a tweet. But they use their own shortener and that doesn’t give you the extra statistics you need. Some Twitter clients allow you to connect to Bitly and that way you can always go back to that site to see which URLs did well.

Bonus tip: did you know you could see the stats for any Bitly URL, even other people’s. just by adding a + to the end of the url? Like this: https://bitly.com/PAVfqj+

9: Optimize for more followers
When you just got your Twitter account you were announcing it left and right to get to your first ten followers. Remember that? Nowadays you might have it listed in some places, but maybe it is time to renew your promotion efforts. Do you mention your Twitter handle in your email signature? Is it on your contact page and in the sidebar of your blog? Do you have it visible at the entrance to your office? Does it make sense to print stickers and hand them out? Maybe it is time for a newsletter to your employees, members or customers with a friendly reminder that you are active on Twitter and a few instructions on how to follow you?

Bonus tip: Another way to get more followers is to promote your Twitter handle at Twitter Counter. We don’t sell followers (that would be dodgy) but we can promote the hell out of you and put you in front of hundreds of thousands of people who are looking for new people to follow.

10: Keep your inbox clean
Twitter sends out very friendly emails once or twice a week and that’s just fine, except when you already get a lot of email or have several Twitter accounts to manage. Fortunately it is easy to stop the email avalanche by opting out of them altogether. Just go to the Email Notifications page and uncheck everything, then go through each one and think about if you REALLY want an email for that: https://twitter.com/settings/notifications

Bonus tip: Use TwitterMail to tweet! One of our tools is called TwitterMail and does just what it describes. You can use email to post to twitter. It can be a super useful tool and it has a small army of loyal users, and it is free for Twitter Counter users. Give it a try: http://twittermail.com

11: Super Bonus Bonus Tip: show some love
Twitter wouldn’t be Twitter without the connections between people. It thrives on retweets, replies and the connections that people make. A mention is a little act of generosity that takes about one click but is always much appreciated. Say hello to a few people, and when you do, say hello from us too.

Sincerely,

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (@Boris)
Co-founder TwitterCounter.com

UPDATE TUESDAY JANUARY 22TH

After putting up a great fight (which took longer than we expected), Justin Bieber took Lady Gaga’s crown this early morning (CET time). Currently the difference in follower count is fluctuating between 1000-2000, proving the margins were really really close. Check out our Top 100 page to check the numbers!

Yesterday we released a press release about our prediction on Justin Bieber overtaken Lady Gaga as the most followed user on Twitter (see the press release here), here’s the news for you!

Lady Gaga, the unofficial queen of Twitter, has ruled the Twitter kingdom since August 2010 when she overtook Britney Spears as the most followed person on Twitter. But it seems now that young boy wonder Justin Bieber is planning on staging a coup and taking the crown to become the first king of Twitter since Ashton Kutcher held the first place.

For now, Lady Gaga is in the lead with 33,103,865 followers compared to Justin Bieber’s 33,037,430 followers (Wednesday January 16th). These numbers are updated hourly at Twitter Counter.

Bieber’s account is growing at a faster rate than Gaga’s, adding around 45.000 followers on a daily basis compared to 28.000 followers new daily followers for Lady Gaga.

When Lady Gaga overtook Britney Spears as the most followed person, Justin Bieber was already closing in to grab the number one spot. It took him almost 18 months to get it but he’s taking the Twitter crown on Sunday, January 20 between 4:23pm and 4:24pm EST.

Predicting a specific date is very difficult as the margins between the two accounts are really close (around 15.000), but this is our current predicted time.

Twitter Counter’s prediction tool is based on historical data and the trajectory is calculated from that data. We have been tracking the accounts of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber from the moment their accounts were created we have a large dataset to base our predictions on.

We’ve predicted some nice milestones in the past as well: Last September we correctly predicted when Lady Gaga would hit the 30 million followers mark. We also predicted Charlie Sheen would hit 1 Million followers in 2 days. (see point 5 in this article). When NBA star Jeremy Lin exploded on Twitter we predicted when he would reach 1 Million followers.

Twitter Counter currently tracks over 82 Million Twitter users and provides people with simple and professional Twitter stats.

The coming year we’re already celebrating Twitter’s 7th birthday. In the last 6,5 years, Twitter has proved itself to be a valuable communication tool for companies, professionals and individuals. We can safely say it has become a permanent way of communication in our ever changing and connected world. People on Twitter are always able to stay up-to-date on new developments and their reach and public is still growing (200 million active users in December 2012).

At Twitter Counter we want to give you a similar up-to-date possibility regarding the Twitter stats of accounts you think are interesting. That’s why we are introducing two new features to enrich your Twitter Counter experience:

Buy-stats:
Want to see what’s been happening around a certain Twitter account? You can now purchase their statistics for a one-time fee of $29 and get everything we know in a neat and tidy CSV file.

The statistics you download include the number of tweets, followers and users followed, at a daily interval beginning from when we started tracking a certain user. Every now and then Twitter’s data is temporarily unavailable though, which cause small gaps in our statistics, so the statistics are based only on the amount of days for which we actually have received data. The completeness of the statistics you want to purchase is represented by the “Integrity” level of the statistics. For example, the integrity level of Lady Gaga’s (@ladygaga) stats is 84%, for Justin Bieber’s account (@justinbieber) it’s even 92%!

For who?

The buy-stats feature is for everyone who wants to stay up-do-date on the Twitter accounts they find interesting. We created this feature because we kept receiving a lot of requests from journalists and companies to see the full stats of certain Twitter accounts, to compare them to other accounts and to see how they performed over time. Also did we see an increase in requests when companies and/or persons have been featured in news items or on popular websites. Just press the button “Buy Stats” on your person of interest’s Twitter Counter page. After purchasing these one-time stats they are available for download for 30 days.

Tracking & Notifications
Next to the buy-stats feature we’re introducing another feature for those who want to stay updated on the Twitter accounts they find interesting.

When you visit the statistics page of an account on Twitter Counter you can now see a “Track” button. This button enables you to track the statistics of this certain account.

It also makes sure that we send you notifications when the account(s) you track reach certain Twitter milestones, like their followers and/or tweets count.

You can get these notifications via e-mail or even send to you in a Tweet if you like. You can specify your preferences per tracked account.

It’s a new year! Have you thought about your digital goals and resolutions?
2013 promised to be an even more social year than the past few years, with Twitter becoming more mainstream and integrated into people’s lives.

Considering this fact, it’s a good thing to realize your presence on Twitter is ever changing and getting more important, both for brands and individuals.
So here are 5 Twitter tips & tricks to strengthen your influence on Twitter and keep your followers engaged in 2013.

1. Get your story straight
For brands, as well for bloggers, 2013 is going to be all about telling your story via multiple platforms. Each platform strengthens the other, creating a total story and/or experience. Get visual with videos or Instagram and tell your (brand) story across different platforms, including Twitter (point 3 below).

BUT, keep in mind to get (and keep) your story straight. Today’s connected generation already uses these multiple platforms in coherence to get their information. It’s important to use these platforms in the same way as your (possible) audience, this way you’ll be able to engage with your followers around a more lively story that connects on all platforms.

2. Keep it real
Being on Twitter is almost like being part of a cult. Rules and etiquette are (mostly) unwritten but ever present. Don’t try to overcompensate the story you want to tell via your Twitter account (whether personal or brand related). We’ve seen our fare share of badly created memes and supposedly funny retweets and @mentions by companies in 2012. Stop it.

Keep it personal and real, your followers aren’t stupid. They know there’s a person behind that @name and that’s why conversation is king. Your followers make up who you are as a brand or business, get to know them.

3. Get visual
Twitter is one of coolest ways to tell your story. The 140 character limitation forces you to really think about what you are sharing with the world. This means your tweets should be of strong content (and preferably around 70-110 characters) if you want them to serve as a trigger for interaction and engagement.

The best way to strengthen your message(s) even more is with great (and relevant) visuals. A picture still says more than a thousand words, so it will definitely help you to get your tweet some great traction.

4. Get ready for the weekend
If you really want to be a part of this whole Twitter thing and get on a personal level with your followers you’ve got to get ready to be tweeting in the weekend. Shown in multiple publications, Twitter engagement rates for brands are about 17 percent higher on weekends compared to weekdays.

This doesn’t necessarily mean your Twitter efforts will be less effective on Monday through Friday, but it does show that the weekend is the perfect time to get your story out in the Twittersphere.

5. Sharing is caring
Don’t be afraid to share other tweets and content that are not necessarily related to your business or what you do as a person. In essence, Twitter is all about learning and discovering new things and sharing those things with your community.

“Sharing is caring” sounds really corny but it can’t get more true than that. Try to share new and interesting content and you’ll see your followers will engage with you.
Part of Twitter is to help each other to reach higher levels and new grounds of knowledge. Don’t be afraid to jump into this, Twitter is still only speeding up.

That’s it!, we hope you’ll have a great year on Twitter in 2013!
Follow us via @TheCounter to see what we are up to this year!

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a post on Mediabistro, called The ten most popular brands on Twitter. It was a post from March this year, so it was still relatively recent. The online world moves so fast, and brands are becoming increasingly aware of the need to have a social presence. That’s why I decided to take a look at the top 10 today, and see if anything has changed in the last nine months.

And sure enough, it has – there are three newcomers to the top ten. The number one, which is still @youtube by some distance, has doubled in followers since March, to more than twenty million. However, overall it resides only in eighth place overall in Twitter’s top 100.

The first seven handles – and this is not a surprise – belong to celebrities, with Justin Bieber and Katy Perry trailing the Queen of Twitter, Lady Gaga.

However, sticking squarely to the brand realm, what exactly has changed in recent months? Let’s take a look.

The positions of the brands in the overall top hundred of Twitter users have been included for context, which lets you see the difference in popularity more clearly.

For example, there are only two brands in the top twenty Twitter users (@Youtube and @Twitter), and overall there are 17 brands represented in the top 100. These brands all have at least 5.4 Million followers.

We can see @Instagram has made quite an impact, currently holding down third place. This is likely related to the massive media attention it garnered in the wake of its Facebook acquisition, as well as the launch of Instagram’s Android app earlier this year.

In the graph above we can actually see that @Instagram only just recently overtook @twitter_es for the third place on October 8th.

Given that Instagram takes third spot, we also see some movement in places four to seven, but nothing massive. These brands are still maintaining a strong growth. But in position eight and nine, we see the two other newcomers.

FC Barcelona, the famous football club from Spain, has landed a spot in the top 10 Twitter brands, and is really pushing its social strategy. This shows also non-tech/Internet brands can achieve a lot with a good social presence and engagement.

In ninth position we can see @programapanico, which is a comedy show that airs on Brazilian television. This reveals that Brazil is a country with a rising Twitter user-base, as more and more locals get access to the Internet.

Where  there are winners, there must be losers too. So let’s look at the other seven brands in the overall top hundred, to see what has changed.

We can see that, compared to March, the @NBA and @Google Twitter accounts have dropped out of the top 10, with @Google making the biggest drop and now also being the last brand present in the overall top 100 at number 97.

The biggest loser, however, is E! Online’s @eonline, which was the former number ten in the top brands list in March 2012. They have been overtaken by other brands on Twitter, and are not even in the overall top 100 anymore.

We can see that Twitter is growing bigger and that brands must maintain and even improve their social strategy. It’s a given that celebrity accounts will most likely be the most followed overall, but it’s cool to see that brands with a good social strategy, image and presence can notch up such a high number of followers too.

At Twitter Counter, we keep a daily track of Twitter’s top 10,000 accounts, and record trends and changes as they happen. Let’s see what happens in 2013…

Want to see how your own follower growth is doing? Sign in in here!
For much more cool statistics, like mentions and RT’s, check out our Pro Stats.

Unless you have been living under a rock lately, you’ve probably heard the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI, has officially joined Twitter last Monday. Since its official launch, the Pope’s twitter handle @Pontifex gained more than 500,000 followers in just 3 days. According to our prediction tool it will take 7 days (Thursday December 13th) until he reaches the magic 1 million followers milestone. But chances are that Pope Benedict XVI will reach this much sooner, as he will be attending a live tweeting event at the end of his weekly audience, on Wednesday the 12th.

We’re keeping a close eye on @pontifex’s follower growth and you can do too! Just hit the “Track” button on Pope Benedict XVI’s TwitterCounter profile and we will notify you when he reaches the 1 million milestone.

Barack Obama’s celebratory tweet is not only the most retweeted post of all time, its also good on his way to becoming the first tweet with more than 1 million retweets! At the time of writing, the celebratory tweet of the just re-elected president of the Unites States already surpassed 780,000 retweets:

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

At this pace Barack Obama might be the first person on Twitter who’s tweet has been retweeted more than 1 million times! In a Twitter world dominated by celebrities and musicians, it’s remarkable that the one who breaks the 1 million retweet milestone is not the Queen of Twitter – Lady Gaga, but a politician. Known for breaking several Twitter followers records, this record might even be too hard for her and her 31 million followers to break.

We’ve been tracking Barack Obama’s Twitter Stats since September 26, 2008. Currently his account has 22,855,529 followers and in the final 10 days of his re-election campaign he gained more than 1 million followers (845K+ yesterday) and ensured his return to the top five most followed on Twitter rankings. He’s currently holding the #5 position and according to our prediction tool he is set to hit the 25,000,000 landmark in about 10 days.

Check Barack Obama’s Twitter stats.

There have been a lot of stories written on the web about spam and bots on Twitter. And with 140 million active users and more than 340 million tweet each day, Twitter unfortunately becomes a more attractive target for spammers. Spambots on Twitter is nothing new, and it happens to us all every once in a while. But last week we were notified by some helpful tweeps that there might be a link between Twitter Counter and spam followers.

Let us preface the rest of this blog post by stating that we would never purposefully send spam followers to our users. We also would like to apologize to users who have been affected by these spam followers. It was never our intention to give you a negative experience with Twitter Counter.

What happened?

This week we were approached by users of Twitter Counter, stating that they’d seen an increase in spam followers when they logged in to Twitter Counter.

1/7 @thecounter Strong possibility Spam Bot is using list of Twitter users logging into TwitterCounter to spread ‘Spam followers’ on Twitter — Paul Chatterton (@paulchat) July 31, 2012

Following our initial contact with these users we set on investigating where this might have come from. We quickly distinguished three possible sources for what had happened: our Twitter Widget, our custom follow button or one of our three Twitter accounts.

Our Twitter Widget keeps track of all visitors logged in to Twitter Counter, which could explain why these users were suddenly followed when logged in to Twitter Counter. We placed a couple forms of tracking on our (@TheCounter‘s) widget to try and detect whether bots were automatically loading the widget. By setting special session variables, and checking for HTTP referrers, we were able to analyse traffic for suspicious activity. Unfortunately this yielded nothing conclusive. 

We suspected, since it concerned spam followers, that somehow our button might be abused through automated clicks. We could, however, through tracing, find no evidence that any of the spambots mentioned by users affected, had used the button.

The third option was that a spambot had found one of our Twitter streams. We send out a couple of automated Tweets on these accounts, of people who’ve logged in to Twitter Counter. Through our own testing, and with the help of @anyapalmer, we were able to conclude that these automated Tweets were indeed the source of the spam followers. When users logged in to Twitter Counter for the first time, our @TheRemote automatically sent an @mention to that account. As we found out this resulted in being followed by spambots within the next few hours to days. As soon as we found out, we halted these automated Tweets.

Steps taken and the future

We’ve stopped with the automated Tweets, which should prevent any new users from experiencing what others have. We’re also monitoring those parts of our service which are vulnerable to being used by spambots. We hope that this will prevent any future events. We fully recognise that by Tweeting to users on our accounts we enabled spambots to follow you. Our failure to anticipate this is where we are to blame. We are therefore very grateful to those who voiced their concerns to us and were instrumental in helping us detect the source. For some users this is, regrettably, too late. We hope, however, that your experience with Twitter Counter going onwards will be better.

As a final word, if you ever find that you’re being followed by spambots, right after you’ve logged in to Twitter Counter, or have used any other part of our service, please notify us straight away via our support email support@twittercounter.com.