Twitter Math: If Accounts Were Ranked By Followers, This Would Be The Equation

exp(21 – 1.1*log(#followers))

If you ever wanted to know where you rank among Twitter users in terms of the followers you have, that’s the equation. Well, for most of you anyway. Twitter tech lead Pankaj Gupta tweeted that equation out earlier today.

A Twitter Equation: If accounts were ranked by #followers, approx. rank=exp(21 – 1.1*log(#followers)). e.g., 331 with 1M followers!

Sure enough, exp(21 – 1.1*log(1,000,000)) = 331.272, if my math is correct. And by “my” math, I of course mean WolframAlpha’s math.

The caveat is that this equation only holds if you have between 100 and a million Twitter followers, Gupta tweets. “It’s amazing how seemingly complex systems are internally just equations,” he notes.

But since that range covers the vast majority of Twitter users, this should be useful to see where you stand.

Plugging my own numbers (31,074 followers) into the equation puts me at a rank of around 15,085 in this system. Mike, with 58,722 followers, would be ranked around 7,490. Scoble, with 156,709 followers, would be about 2,544.

All of this is particularly interesting since we know that Twitter has a secret “reputation ranking” score for every user. This is something Twitter might even make public in the future. But this equation has nothing to do with that, apparently. “I should add that this is not how we rank twitter users for anything interesting we do internally,” Gupta tells us.

I still prefer to use my Twitter Golden Ratio.

Also, if my math is correct here (and by “math” I mean deduction skills). That means that Twitter has roughly 331 users with more than a million followers.

Crunchbase

• TWITTER

Company: Twitter

Website: twitter.com

Launch Date: March 21, 2006

Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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