22 June 2011

Some top genealogy tweeters

Has anyone not heard of Twitter, a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages tweets, text-based posts of up to 140 characters?

According to Wikipedia Twitter is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 190 million tweets a day and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.

Inevitably some of that is genealogical. If you search Twitter for genealogy you'll find an active community. Below is a graphic showing who is posting using the word genealogy. It covers only 500 tweets, all posted June 22.  

I've been following who posts using The Archivist http://archivist.visitmix.com/ The online version only shows the most recent 500 genealogy tweets but I've noticed a pattern.

By far the largest single poster of genealogy tweets, the top poster every time I've checked, is UK based FamilyTree Folk, tweets 28,120 sent and 1,375 followers. A follower is someone who has subscribed to receive all the tweets posted from a particular account. A typical tweet from FamilyTreeFolk is 

Your not using PVC clear pockets for your valuable written/printed work are you? http://bit.ly/diISZU #genealogy #familyhistory #archival

The order amongst other tweeters high in this 500 tweet sample, ranked here according to number of followers, is:

Gould Genealogy is Australia based so goes up and down the rankings depending on the time difference. It has 4,915 tweets and 1,081 followers.

UK based Peter Western, posting as maxgenealogy, has 10.330 tweets and 794 followers

Scottish blogger Chris Paton is frequently high in the rankings. He has posted 5,472 tweets and has 632 followers.

Frances Ellsworth, from Texas, has made 6,605 tweets and has  573 followers

Some tweeters don't show as high in this sample but still have many followers. For example, US professional genealogist Michael Hait has posted 2,781 tweets and attracted 1,468 followers, a very favourable ratio of followers to tweets and more followers than FamilyTreeFolk.

2 comments:

GeniAus said...

Surprised to find myself(@geniaus) from Australia on the list. I am just a passionate amateur who uses Twitter as an online learning tool and to share my discoveries. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of your list as to how many tweeters are commercial bodies like @gouldgenealogy, professional genealogists like @cmpation and little old amateurs like me.

Chris Paton said...

Damn, narrowly missed out on the bronze! lol :)

Chris (@chrismpaton)