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…

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