The Big Money’s Twitter 12

If there was going to be a Facebook 50, there had to be a Twitter 12.

After all, 2009 has been Twitter’s year. Traffic has quadrupled, investors have recommitted, the media has fawned. Even if Twitter isn’t the future of social media, it’s certainly the shiniest, newest thing flitting in front of us. And businesses love shiny new things.

Thus, this year has also seen corporate America come into its own on Twitter. Some use it for customer service, others for exclusive coupons, and still others to pump out RSS feeds of in-house events. In Twitter, PR departments have found a two-way loudspeaker: an unfiltered way to reach a company’s fans and a Big Brother opportunity to keep tabs on its detractors. As an entire social media platform devoted to self-marketing, it’s amazing Twitter isn’t funded by the Chamber of Commerce.

The Big Money set out to figure out which companies sit on top of the Twitter heap. The overarching question: Which companies get the most out of Twitter?

To figure out the answer, we took a mix of the salient metrics: number of followers, growth over the last two months, number of tweets, and whether the account is doing anything besides providing a transplanted RSS feed. We only included companies with follower counts higher than a million. (There were other stipulations—for instance, the feed needed to represent the company, not the CEO of the company, and the business couldn’t be a derivative of Twitter.) The assumption was that a company with 100,000 followers couldn’t be getting more out of Twitter than the one with a million. That left us with 32 companies. With the help of Twitterholic, a site that tracks Twitter accounts’ metrics, we aggregated the sites’ stats and created a weighted rubric by which to judge.