Rebecca Corliss and the Boston University Terriers are Elite from Schneider Mike on Vimeo.

I just wanted to proclaim that the Boston University Terriers are far superior to my beloved Miami University Redhawks. I would also like to encourage you to follow the incomparable Rebecca Corliss on twitter! . Which I would recommend whether I lost the bet or not. She rocks.

Back on 4/17/2009, Oprah Winfrey tweeted for the first time. Although officially she joined twitter in January, she held out until spring until she could schedule time to have twitter founder Evan Williams on her show to make a media event out of her first tweet. I’m using the term First Tweet to mean 4/17/2009.

David Armano nicely asked about the Oprah effect on twitter, which got me to thinking. How many people joined twitter since Oprah first tweeted? How many people is she responsible for bringing to twitter?

In order to answer this question, I collected a sample of Oprah’s twitter followers on 5/6/2009, 774,561 of them. Don’t let me lose you here, but I must caveat that twitter is a moving target. As of this post, Oprah is sure to have well over 850,000 followers, but people add and drop all the time. As a result, it’s tough to collect everyone because the API allows you to take a 100 person-at-a-time chunks called a page. That sample becomes changed if someone decides to follow or unfollow Oprah. This basically means that without being able to stop time and twitter and grab all of Oprah’s followers in one swoop, our data is bound to be incomplete or different within seconds of the processes completion.

CYA aside: let’s take a look at Oprah’s following by the date that they joined twitter.

PERCENT GROWTH CHART – First Tweet to 5/6

As you can see, Oprah-twittermania exploded and peaked in 7 days. In our sample, 389,067 of her followers joined twitter on or after First Tweet.

So who is following Oprah? What is the breakdown? I divided followers into the groups.

Elite = 50,000+ followers
Mavens = 10,001- 49,999 followers
Twelebrities = 1,001 – 10,000 followers (hey, if 1000 people know you…)
Starters = 101 – 1000 followers
Noobs = 1 – 100 followers
Nothings = 0 followers

Elite is that tiny sliver (62)

Wait, 159,448 (20.6%) of her following hasn’t done anything yet. Could be spam. Could be lurkers or people who just do not understand how to get involved. Could be the cult of “create-wealth-online”. [I have over 4 businesses online! I am creating wealth! Ask me how!] Could be new people. When I get another cut of data, I will compare their followers and conversations and see if they have become more involved.

I asked 200 people who joined twitter after Oprah started if they joined because of Oprah. This is not scientific, but about 50% of my replies were “yes”. Anecdote: one person said MC Hammer was their inspiration! Please Hammer, don’t hurt em!

So the lion’s share, more than 93%, of her followers are people who are brand spanking new or just getting started at the party (Noobs + Nothings). The question is: how will these people assimilate to twitter? This is a question I will attempt to answer over time. Let’s chew on this a bit. I’ll refresh the data and maybe we can drill into some of their conversations. What do you want to know about these people? Comments on this “study” are appreciated and I will try to incorporate your feedback. Example: Maybe I should reorganize the segments to take updates into account? Does only having 100 followers really mean you are a NOOB? Some digging showed that a good deal of low follower / high updates were content aggregators like @sevenplanet and spammers like @hardflash. Let’s keep them in this category for now.

Thanks for reading! @SchneiderMike