Did you know that there are only 26 Twitter accounts that have more than 5 million followers?  A disproportionate 13 of these 26 are singers, while the rest is a mix of media personalities, actors, actresses, the President Barack Obama, and Twitter‘s official account.

The top ten Twitter accounts according to the number of followers are:

• Lady Gaga, 14.2 million followers
• Justin Bieber, 13.2 million followers
• Katy Perry, 10.5 million followers
• Barack Obama, 10.4 million followers
• Kim Kardashian, 10.2 million followers
• Britney Spears, 10.0 million followers
• Shakira, 9.0 million followers
• Taylor Swift, 8.3 million followers
• Rihanna, 8.1 million followers
• Ashton Kutcher, 7.9 million followers

Three other celebrities come close to the 5-million followers mark:

• Charlie Sheen (4.99 million)
• Paris Hilton (4.96 million)
• Mariah Carey (4.94 million)

Other interesting Twitter facts:

• Who has the most active Twitter account?  Xbox Support takes the podium with 752,809 tweets over a span of 2 years and 3 months.
• Do you know who has been snubbing more than a million fans on Twitter?  The very much pregnant Beyonce Knowles has around 1.78 million followers and she has not yet tweeted!  And to think that her account has already been active for two and a half years!
• Yet Kobe Bryant recently showed that he can do it in hasty style.  Kobe opened a Twitter account on October 5, tweeting “Can You hear me now!?!?”  Three hours and 35,000 followers later, he shut it down.
• If you want to talk about flash floods, er, flash follower increases, then Bill Gates is certainly worth a mention.  Within minutes of announcing to the world that he was on Twitter, around 40,000 people immediately followed him!
• Now let us look at the other side of the equation.  Do you know who the most prolific “follow-er” is?  She is none other than the late John Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono.  Yoko Ono follows 714,050 people! And she’s only been on Twitter for a little less than three years!  We think that it would be a headache to manage her timeline and her lists!
• Barack Obama, on the other hand, follows 688,614 people.  HootSuite, Threadless and Whole Foods Market rounds up the top five following more than 500,000 people each.
• If you were wondering who the oldest Twitter is, there are actually 13 accounts created on March 21, 2006, which is around four months before it was officially launched.  These 13 are considered to be the oldest accounts on Twitter:

1. Jack Dorsey
2. Biz Stone
3. Crystal
4. Noah Glass
5. Jeremy
6. Tony Stubblebine
7. Adam Rugel
8. Evan Williams
9. Dom Sagolla
10. Rabble
11. Tim Roberts
12. Meredith
13. RayReadyRay

• Oh wait, did you mean who the oldest Twitter user is?  That’s  a fairly easy question to answer.  Ivy Bean was 104 when she died in 2010, and she is considered to be the oldest Twitter user.  If you think that’s remarkable, consider that Bean transferred to Twitter because Facebook would not allow her to add more than 5,000 friends.

Focus on Brands

Although Twitter and Facebook have been pitted against each other for so long, did you know that Facebook has a Twitter account?  It is a fairly old one too at more than 4 years and 6 months old!  Facebook has made around 946 tweets to its 1.6 million followers.

But even that does not make Facebook land in the top 5.  The top five brands on Twitter are:

• Whole Foods Market, 2.1 million followers
• Starbucks Coffee, 1.7 million followers
• Threadless, 1.7 million followers
• JetBlue Airways, 1.7 million followers
• Woot.com, 1.6  million followers

Taken together, these brands would not really top Lady Gaga, or even Shakira at 7th place.