Barack Obama, Taylor Swift Are Most Listed Twitterers

Posted on October 29, 2009

President Barack Obama and Taylor Swift appear to be the most listed people or organizations on Twitter as of this writing. This could easily change as there are still many people who do not yet have Twitter lists enabled. Here is a short list of the most listed Twitterers as of right now, noonish on Thursday, October 29th.

@BarackObama: 3,571
@taylorswift13: 3,178
@cnnbrk: 2,922
@mashable: 2,654
@TheEllenShow: 2,649
@johncmayer: 2,486
@ladygaga: 2,470
@aplusk: 2,441
@ddlovato: 2,246
@katyperry: 2,196
@google: 2,143
@stephenfry: 2,128
@twitter: 2,039
@selenagomez: 1,987
@TheOnion: 1,866
@oprah: 1,860

I created this short list manually and it will no doubt be automated by someone using Twitter's API in the days ahead. It's probably not a surprise to see celebrities and news organization leading the pack. Early on the most listed list had more tech people as you can see here but that has changed somewhat. Those who first had Twitter lists was probably dominated by peeps in the tech industry. Who is on the most lists won't really tell the whole story because determining reach on Twitter has become much more complex. There is the issue that people can follow other people's lists which may be hard to calculate. There are also plain old follower counts but even those don't tell you the whole story because a lot of people have followers that have abandoned Twitter.

Lists and followers will be used to measure how much reach a person or organization has on Twitter even if the measure is imperfect. The great thing about lists is not as a way to measure popularity but that they allow people to organize twitter accounts and their incoming tweets. This way they can get a lot more value out of Twitter.