With Twittermania in full swing globally, I wanted to see just how much Twitter has taken hold in the Caribbean. So I used wefollow.com, which is a user-powered Twitter directory to track how many twitterers we had under the Caribbean tag/category.
The top 12 Twitterers list was developed by this single directory using a single determinant- how many followers/subscribers does each Twitterer have. What I found was that the top 12 people/sites/individuals/companies with the most followers in the Caribbean are:
1. PiscesinPurple - 1731 followers
2. DonaldTurnbull -1243 followers
3. Timprescott - 1022 followers
4. Jamaica - 990 followers
5. WeddingMoons - 951 followers
6. Dividivadesign - 895 followers
7. Georgiap - Managing Director, Global Voices, Caribbean citizen - 856 followers
8. ChannelHaiti - L ‘Union Fait la Force - 706 followers
9. UsVirgin Islands - US Virgin Islands news and updates. - 684 followers
10. St Lucia Property -Matching people with properties on the island of Saint Lucia - 520 followers
11. The Royalty Club - 518 followers
12. Caribbean Food TV - 478 followers
At the top of the list is a personal blog, PiscesinPurple.com by a woman named Maria, dubbed Letters from Grenada-Confessions of a reformed tourist. In second place is Donald Turnbull, a Caribbean Diaspora blogger, programmer and entrepreneur who lives in Chicago. In third place is a Bajan dude Timothy A. Prescott who tweets both local Barbados stuff and global things as well. He describes himself as a Creative thinker, product developer, Graphic artist, photographer, sustainable community business consultant, alternative health enthusiast, husband, father. Rounding out the top 5 twitterers is a Twitter account dubbed Jamaica which gives news and updates.
I noted that in the top 5, there are no Caribbean mainstream media listed here. There is only one tourism related twitter account in the Top 5, which is WeddingMoons that is promoting themselves as “The best all-inclusive destination weddings and honeymoons in the Caribbean”, and the brand is the Sandals Hotel chain. They are using it to promote specials offered, features and events and also even more importantly to listen to their customers and give instant response.
Now, I did this exercise mainly out of curiousity and I used only one tracking tool and while not all Caribbean twitterers may be registered with wefollow.com (even as I’d encourage them to be), for me it was enough to at least get an early inkling as who is ahead of the game right now in using this powerful and now globally renowned social media tool and for what purposes. I did this exercise too to see who was on, to check to if mainstream media, tourism interests and Caribbean businesses were using this tool and how.
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This was insightful Ingrid.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Just a suggestion. You may have had a more effective search by also using Twitterholic and searching by individual country. Not many Caribbean twitterers and bloggers readily identify themselves as Caribbean in their profiles but they do identify their home country.
Coffeedude
April 27th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
thanks coffee dude…will check out twitterholic.com.
April 27th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
[...] Caribe posted a list today: Top 12 Caribbean Twitterers. While I am pleased that I am #1, I find there are some additional Caribbean Twitterers who deserve [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Interesting and instructive !!
April 28th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
hmmm, I have only made it to 21 in my Twitter quest! Ah well, I’m sure it will improve as I get more established…I’m not really selling anything, so do you think that might help? Well, selling information, I suppose, being a guide…
Twitterholic has me at 110th in my region, that region being the UK - I think that’s pretty good, eh? But actually I’m Twittering mainly about things in the Caribbean, so I’m probably not a good case study.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
You should add http://twitter.com/jamaicansmusic to the top 12 - we have over 1,000 followers
April 30th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
[...] Top 12 Caribbean Twitterers…what does that mean anyway ? [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Interesting idea, very flawed methodology. First, there are many many twitter tools, and everyone is not on all of them. Second, on wefollow.com, one can only add 3 tags. Caribbean is unlikely to be one, as most ppl use the country, and then 2 tags for the fields in which one works or in which one is interested. The point of twitter is to find like-minded people, not only geographically linked people. For example, I changed my tags on wefollow.com today to include trinidad, but for the past year or so I had no geographical tag. and it didn’t even cross my mind to tag myself as Caribbean!
So based on just these two items, there is no way that you could have found even a fraction of the caribbean people on twitter, far less the top 12.
I also have an issue with ranking the “Top 12″ by number of followers. There are some excellent tweeters who, by tweeting in a very specific niche have not got over a million followers, like Oprah, but should be considered as “Top” by virtue of the quantity and quality of their tweets. No one in their right mind would consider Oprah a top tweeter, but she has a vast number of followers. The quality of the tweets - I’ll leave it up to you to judge… see an example here:
Got to hug Whoopi. Haven’t seen her since????! What a fun night.
11:38 PM May 5th from web
Quality tweeting!
retweets are also used as a measure of quality. If the post is good and useful, then others will retweet it. If it’s crap, people won’t.
I think this article missed the entire concept/point/principle of the twitterverse. It reduces a complex network of social interaction to a single metric (followers) that does not gauge the quality of the interaction. It does not even consider a representative sample of caribbean people on twitter.
It seems as if the author heard about this “twitter thing” and dashed off something without attempting to properly research or understand what they were writing about.
And no, I’m never going to be one of the top Caribbean tweeters by any metric, (this sort of ranking and judging isn’t my thing at all) so this isn’t just sour grapes from not being on the list!
May 15th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
@Jacqueline.Thanks for your input…but I maintain, it was an exercise in curiosity more than trying to create a true list. That said I am so happy with the varying responses I’ve gotten to this list as well as that for Jamaica. Alot of great information, insight and ohh yeah polarized opinions were shared and that’s great!
May 15th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
[...] Related Posts An Interesting Use For Twitter Top 5 Reasons Why Dancehall / Reggae Artistes Should Be On Twitter How I doubled my followers on Twitter in 24hrs in 5 steps. Top 12 Caribbean Twitterers…what does that mean anyway ? [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 12:46 am