Whole Foods in Rare Company: Non-Tech, Media, or Celebrity Brand in Top Twitter Lists

Steve Rubel mentioned today that Whole Foods “became the first consumer brand (e.g. non-tech, celebrity or media) to go seven-digits on Twitter.” Last week I had done an analysis of the top 1000 twitter accounts by number of followers (prior to Whole Foods breaking 1 million) and tried to look at what percentage of those were company-specific, finding only 76 company-specific accounts:

  • Over 1 million followers: 30
    • 4 (13%): NPR, Google, NYTimes, CNN
  • 500K to 1 million followers: 120
    • 18 (15%): Entertainment Weekly, CME Group, InStyle, CBOE, CBS News, Pitchfork Media, Nightline, People, Dell Outlet, WomensWearDaily, Good Morning America, World Economic Forum, JetBlue, Zappos, BBC, E! Online, Whole Foods, TIME
  • 100K to 500K followers: 193
    • 20 (10%): Live Earth.org; UNHCR; Newsweek, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, MTV, PeoplePets, CNN, BBC, Orlando Magic, ESPN, iTunes, NFL, Etsy, Funny or Die, Digg, Health, CDC, Gossip Girl, NPR
  • 50K to 100K followers: 293
    • 14 (4.8%): Oprah Magazine, Tyra Banks Show, Us Weekly, HootSuite, Wall Street Journal, TMZ, Wired, the Office, FOX News, Today Show, Masters Tournament, YouTube, Facebook, NASA
  • 32K to 50K followers: 364
    • 20 (5.5%) WordPress, Huffington Post, Sony Playstation, Loyalty360.org, CNN, MacWorld, IMDB, SXSW, PopStar Magazine, CNET, FitnessTown, The View, Squarespace, LFC Liverpool, BBC, Hot97FM, CNN, Vibe Magazine, The Economist, Moonfruit

Filter that list down using Steve’s criteria (company accounts that aren’t tech, celebrity or media — to which I’ve loosely added Sports) plus take out government accounts (CDC emergency with 532,285 followers and NASA with 90,833) that list gets even smaller:

  • Whole Foods (1,011,755)
  • Zappos (960,979)
  • Jet Blue (869,527)
  • Etsy (500,341)
  • Southwest Airlines (276,987)
  • Starbucks (251,199)
  • Sony PlayStation (47,911)

Having broken down the tweets of Zappos in the past (as well as their “engagement” rates), will take a look at how Whole Foods is leveraging its Tweets in another post.

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