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

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.

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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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.