How Do You Gauge Twitter Fame?

I want the money, the women, fortune and fame /

That means I'll end up burning in hell scorching in flames

-Eminem, Rock Bottom

I recently blogged about celebrity Twitter followers here and here.

There's something fascinating- shallowly so- about the ease of contacting a celebrity on Twitter. Just @ them (“at” them. It's a verb, now) in your status, and they see it in their mentions. No sending a letter by air mail. No phoning agents. No contacting official website developers. Just you, the celeb, and 140 characters to express yourself. Oh, and everyone you follow can see what you've written to them. Alas, Twitter only allows you to send private messages to tweeters who follow you back.

While writing the aforementioned blog posts, I found myself wondering- “How can you tell how famous someone is? Is Schwarzeneggar more famous than Stallone? Britney more famous than Beiber? Is it relative?”

In the real world, level of fame probably relates to two things.

1. Media coverage, which is hard to assess
2. Income. Who makes the most money?

In the online world- particularly Twitter- we measure fame by the amount of connections the individual has online. P Diddy, for instance, has 3,406,328 followers at the time of writing.

He's vastly overshadowed by honest-hipped she-wolf Shakira. 4,768,119 people want to know what she's doing with herself these days.

Hence, according to Twitter, Shakira is more famous than P Diddy.

Shakira has sold 60 million albums.

P Diddy has sold 12 Million Albums, according to Answers.com

If I were asked to guess, I would have thought P Diddy the more famous one- but I don't live in Colombia where Shakira is HUGE. So record sales and Twitter followers might go hand-in-hand.

Anyway. Enough market analysis. The point I'm making is, the more Twitter followers someone has, the higher their profile. So, to gauge how famous your followers are, check how many followers they have themselves.

Let's play Twitter Top Trumps.

My top follower is adult actress Vicky Vette with 93,373 followers.

She's tailed by Social Media guru Denise Wakeman with 21,042 followers.

Granted, they follow people in the thousands themselves, but it's a start. They wouldn't be being followed if they weren't in demand. If you really wanted to get complicated, you'd have to look at ratios of followers to followings. And that's something my figure-retarded mind can't grasp at all.

Can anyone beat Ms Vette?

As a side point, and just to gauge my own social status against these people, I'm currently at a whopping 136 followers. Fancy making it 137?

http://twitter.com/#!/matthewtuckey