About Tweetalist

Twitter can be a scary place.

There are 200 million people on Twitter, and they post over 1.6 billion Tweets per day.

Tweetalist is here to help you make sense of who the most influential people on Twitter are.

Tweetalist monitors trends in Twitter's public lists, and it helps you reach some surprising conclusions.

For example, Tweetalist tells us that Barack Obama has greater reach than a media powerhouse like Oprah Winfrey, due to the quality of the lists that follow Obama.

Tweetalist is the only service that analyzes Twitter influence based on Twitter lists.

What is a Twitter list?

In 2009, Twitter introduced a new feature that allowed Twitter users to create lists to categorize and follow specific groups of people on Twitter. Before the creation of Twitter lists, Twitterers had to lump all of the people they followed into one feed. But with lists, you could create what are essentially "mini-feeds." With your Twitter account, you're allowed to create up to 20 separate lists, and each list can follow up to 500 Twitterers. Influential Twitterers like Justin Bieber are followed by hundreds of thousands of lists. Prominent technologists like Pete Cashmore are followed by different lists.

Where Did Tweetalist Come From?

Tweetalist was created by CiV Digital as a free service to help you analyze influence on Twitter. There are many apps that analyze followers, or Retweets, or various other metrics. Tweetalist helps fill in one of the gaps in understanding of Twitter influence by taking a look at Twitter lists and calculating influence based on certain criteria. We look at how many lists each Twitterer appears on, the topic and composition of the lists, and we analyze other factors that are available through the Twitter API, and then we present the results as a competition (a "faceoff") with another selected Twitterer.

We created this Twitter service for a number of reasons that we don't mind sharing with you. First, we enjoy using the Twitter API to create things, and periodically we like to do things like this to show our clients what's possible. But secondly, we know that Twitter lists have left a lot of Twitter-savvy people scratching their heads, even a year and half after they were first created in 2009. We hope that this app can help with that.

Submit Suggestions

Don't forget, if you want to submit suggestions for more Twitter handles for us to include in Tweetalist, you can do so here.

Tell your Friends

And if you like Tweetalist, please tell your friends about it by Tweeting a link to it, or "liking" us here.