As we’ve discussed in the past, having tons of Twitter followers shouldn’t be your only goal. Still, we wouldn’t fault you if you’ve dreamed of joining the ranks of Justin Bieber and President Obama in the million+ club.

An advertising firm has created a way for you to bump up your 135 follower count all the way to one million followers. And all you’ve got to do is follow a single account.
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The official WikiLeaks account, which tweets about government censorship and its ongoing battle to “open governments”, has surged past one million followers this weekend. This is quite a feat for an organization whose Twitter account was plagued by privacy fears, threats, and hacking attempts for months.
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Only ten weeks have passed since considerable fanfare was attributed to Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) becoming the first Twitter account to surpass one million followers, beating CNN (@cnnbrk) in the process, which hit the magic number shortly afterwards.

Since then, another twenty-three accounts on the network have moved beyond seven digits; fittingly, @Google is the latest, and they celebrated the occasion earlier today with this tweet.

Moreover, four Twitter users now have more than two million followers – Kutcher, Ellen Degeneres (@TheEllenShow), Britney Spears (@BritneySpears) and CNN. Kutcher is quite a ways in front – some 300,000 on Ellen – and @Oprah should join this group in a couple of weeks.

At the back of the pack, @NPRPolitics should be the next account to breach one million, with @Mashable and @MCHammer duking it out for the #27 spot.

I’ve discussed the benefits of breaching the one million mark – it’s a big deal for anybody with something to promote, like a brand or a blog. Even if we assume the relevancy and interests within these networks is quite small, such as 10-20 per cent, that’s still a huge number of people who will click on your links, certainly over the course of a month. Despite what many think, it does matter, and as these numbers build to 10, 20 million, and more, over the next year or two, the people at the top of this hill are going to have enormous power and influence, if only in all the websites they break with a single re-tweet.

It’s official, and it’s finally over: Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) is the first Twitter user to boast one million followers. At the time of writing, he’s added about another fifteen thousand to that total.

@cnnbrk – which only this week became an actual CNN account – looked the clear favourite for a long-time, but some serious buzz around Kutcher over the last 48 hours saw him take the prize with relative ease.

To his credit, Kutcher has donated $100,000 of his own money to MalariaNoMore.org, and others added more to his pot. We can be as cynical as we like about celebrity charity, but it’s a nice gesture. He didn’t have to do it.

Kutcher, alongside wife Demi Moore (@mrskutcher – who still looks absolutely amazing), and friends, sent out a live, streaming video about the time he hit 999,000 followers, and this definitely helped push him over the edge. (Watch a recording of the video here.)

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… probably going to be CNN (@cnnbrk). And, all being well, it should happen within the next 5-7 days.

What happens next?

At the time of writing, @cnnbrk is the number one most-followed account on Twitter with some 933K followers. Readers of this blog may recall my prediction that Britney Spears (@britneyspears) was going to be the first to edge past the one million mark. That looks unlikely now, simply because we’re running out of time, but Britney is right on the 900K mark and definitely closing on @cnnbrk.

In third place is Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) at about 881K. Larry King (@kingsthings – I believe this is genuine) of CNN recently responded to Kutcher’s claims that he would be the first to hit the million mark with this funny video.

It’s a bit of a cheat, of course: both @cnnbrk and @britneyspears have Twitter accounts that are updated by different teams – it would be great if they swapped for 24 hours or so to see if anybody noticed – and so in many respects as Ashton is the only authentic account on there, inasmuch as he updates himself, he probably deserves the plaudits.

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This is a new regular feature to Twittercism. Each Friday I’ll be giving props to the best Twitter articles, news stories, videos and tweets of the last seven days.

The Twouble With Twitters

CurrentTV.com’s video spoof of the Twittersphere was both extremely funny and painfully true.

The Dumbest Tweet Ever?

When James Andrews got offered a new job, he decided to tweet about it:

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

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Since I last wrote about the Twitter top 100 users (by popularity) there have been a few changes in the top ten.

Stephen Fry, who was looking a possible favourite for the overall number one spot just a month ago, has slipped from third to ninth. I’m not sure if there’s been any genuine backlash or whether other more world-famous celebrities have been more readily-followed by newcomers to the network, but he’s definitely lost momentum.

Barack Obama held the number one position quite comfortably this time last month but he’s now been overtaken by the CNN breaking news account (@cnnbrk), although I wouldn’t expect this to continue indefinitely for a couple of reasons. One, that @cnnbrk isn’t actually that good at breaking news, and two, it doesn’t have the global appeal and eagerness to follow you back that Obama’s team does (Mr President doesn’t actually tweet himself). At the time of writing @cnnbrk is following just one other user, some guy called James Cox. Why is this so? (I’ve asked Mr Cox, but have yet to receive a reply.)

A few other celebrities have moved up the leaderboard in the last fortnight, notably @aplusk and @jimmyfallon, and the @twitter account has, possibly rightly-so, entered the top three, but what I want to focus on within this article is the great leaps most of the main Twitter users have seen in their total follow counts.

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