Joining the one million followers club is a pipe dream for the average Twitter user. As for a celebrity or household brand, it often takes months if not years to reach the milestone. But if you’re the President of the United States, it only takes a few hours.
Yesterday, President Barack Obama cracked the one million followers mark less than five hours after sending his first tweet from the new @POTUS account. A day later, he’s on the cusp of surpassing two million followers.
But Obama’s rate of ascension into the upper-echelon of Twitter popularity shouldn’t surprise anyone (the @BarackObama account, run by his staff, has 59.3 million followers). Instead it’s the rate by which he gained followers that’s extraordinary.
To show just how fast Obama picked up followers, we recorded Obama’s followers count every minute from 12 p.m. ET on Monday, when he had a mere 150,000 followers, to the same time on Tuesday when he had 1.88 million followers. For those 24 hours, the first sitting-President to use Twitter gained followers at a rate of 1,213 followers per minute. For comparison, an account that has 1,200 followers is already at the 97th percentile of all active Twitter accounts, according to a 2013 study by data scientist Jon Bruner.
Even more unprecedented was Obama’s 3,314 followers per minute rate between noon and when he received his one-millionth follower at roughly 4:15 p.m. ET yesterday, including a minute period around 12:10 p.m. in which he picked up 14,971 followers.
As shown in the chart above, his follower rate tapered off after midnight to around 500 followers per minute before spiking again in the morning.
Obama sits at 1.96 million followers when this article was published, but he's quickly closing in on Bill Clinton, who has 3.5 million followers since he joined Twitter in April of 2013. Clinton's follower count is also a mere few hundred thousand followers fewer than his wife and 2016 Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, who has 3.53 million followers.
