Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2010. All follower counts were found by hand by the author in early September 2010, and Zapatero and Rajoy are described in their 2010 roles. Twitter has since been renamed X, its verified-account system has changed, and Steve Jobs died in 2011.
At first glance, some of you may wonder what this article has to do with business and investing, the topics we cover every day. The answer is that it has a lot to do with them: not so much with business itself as with the way we approach business, and with market research. That said, I was genuinely surprised when I went looking for the people with the most followers on Twitter.
I started with my own country, Spain, and with our political leaders, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and opposition leader Mariano Rajoy. Both fail the Twitter test: neither has a verified account, so we don’t even know whether they really have one. Of course, they know better than anyone that Twitter is barely used in Spain.
I moved on to our most international artist, David Bisbal, who measures up when it comes to followers, with 607,564.
I looked for our best-paid business owners and executives, and the truth is that neither Amancio Ortega nor Emilio Botín is very big on Twitter either.
I switched to sport, where the winner is our friend Cristiano Ronaldo, with 758,769 followers.
Then I thought of my business leaders and looked up our friend Robert Kiyosaki, with 68,429 followers, and Donald Trump, with 136,229, which shows that learning about finance and business comes behind football.
I searched for two great American businessmen: Steve Jobs, who doesn’t have a verified account, and Bill Gates, with 1,419,376 followers.
I wondered what could stir more passion than interest in Bill Gates, and I found the answer: Shakira, with 2,792,929 followers.
After searching further for someone who could top Shakira, I found only one person, and by a huge margin: the President of the United States, Barack Obama, with 5,213,670 followers.
Not bad at all, considering that I currently have a whopping 14 followers on my own Twitter account.
Conclusions
These are my conclusions from this little study, which may be wrong, since I obviously did it by searching manually and there may be people with more followers.
In Spain, new technologies are slow to catch on; in fact, the e-book has been a sales flop compared with other countries. Even so, if anyone uses new technologies, it’s our young people, and as we’ve seen, football and famous artists interest them far more than any political or financial topic.
On the other hand, how are we going to move forward if those who should be modernizing and promoting new technologies don’t lead by example and use them?
And finally, our business owners still don’t give social networks the importance they deserve as what may well be the best advertising method of the future.
Further reading
- How much Facebook is worth as a business idea
- Business ideas and new jobs in social networks
- Online business opportunities for women
Featured image: Pete Souza, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
