The World Follows - Twitter

People love Facebook - it's exponentially increasing number of users, the avg time a user spent on Facebook and the average friends a user has (around 90) proves this. Twitter numbers are not as jaw-dropping as facebook's, infact a little depressing (>90% of users generate less than 10% of tweets) , but, the potential around twitter is unmatched compared to facebook. Everything is under control in Facebook, but not in case of Twitter. A couple of tweets last year made Lalit Modi get out of IPL and Shashi Taroor from his minister post, these both are celebrities, forget about them. What twitter could do to a normal person?

This post is about a normal guy who rose to stardom after one tweet, just one tweet. His name is Sohaib Athar, resident of Abbottabad, Pakistan. Like many of us, he was too awake at a half past one (localtime) on the 2nd of May when he heard some copters running around in his neighborhood. What he did was just tweet about it. Little he knew the consequences.

He tweeted: "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)." (Source)

This is the FIRST public information world has known about Osama's execution(unknowingly ofcourse). The tweet was just a casual one, but what happened after the tweet is astonishing. He is a local resident, an IT professional, who runs a coffee shop in Abbottabad and reportedly the first to serve fresh brewed coffee in the area.

After his casual tweet, everyone started contacting him. By everyone, I mean, his local resident friends (on twitter), then after a little later, people online at that time on twitter, then the media, one after the other. Al Jazeera, Reuters, NDTV to name a few. This not only made him loose his sleep, but also he realized that his mail box is filling and filling fast with emails from all around the world.

Initially, he started responding to direct tweets and emails but soon lost control over it. By the time he realized, his followers increased by an astonishing 5742% in a day. Little we knew ordinary people having this exponential growth in twitter followers.

Src: TwitterCounter.com (US time)

TwitterCounter predicts that his tomorrow followers would be 112K from 93K (today - 3rd May). The main reason for this huge following in the net-izens could be inclusion of his name in Wikipedia. Yes, there's a new page entry in Wikipedia on his name. The article on wikipedia is considered for deletion, but until this exists, he would definitely enjoy people following him. His name is also mentioned in the Death of Osama wiki page.

What's next?

Most, approx 80%, of the followers he got in these couple of days, probably, might be active twitter information consumers(generally termed, users). His follower rate might become stable in a couple of weeks when he hits his personal best of around 170-190K followers. People on twitter know what information they want from a particular person and why they follow him/her. As soon as Osama is an outdated term in media/people, people start unfollowing him. Approx 50% of his followers might forget that they are following him until they are reminded when he tweets, and they start unfollowing him. He should stop tweeting to have these 50% of the users following him. If he gets back to normal life, people again start unfollowing him. So, even if he tweets/doesn't tweet, his followers count drops.

Following the trend and knowing pulse of the people on twitter will be an interesting homework.

-dp.

PS: I am following @ReallyVirtual just to see what he tweets and how his followers count trend.