Cricket and Social Media, Part 3

Just a reminder that this is all for fun.

And a further disclaimer with  specific regard to this post: I am not claiming this is an exhaustive list.

Below you will find all of the cricketers, past and present, that I could find on Twitter, ranked by the number of Followers they have.

There isn’t a great deal of commentary to add there.

A couple notes: Those are not all Twitter-Verified accounts, but I deleted the obvious fake ones. Also, I did not employ a service like Statuspeople.com to see how many of, say, Sachin’s three million followers are SPAM-bots. The numbers are what the numbers are, in other words. I also did not factor in the fact that some of these accounts are obviously run by a PR firm. The numbers are what the numbers are.

I compiled the list over the period of a couple days, so things might have shifted in there a bit, but I think the list is about as accurate as you are going to get.

And as I mentioned above, the list is by no means exhaustive, so if you can see someone that I am missing, please do post their Twitter handle in the comments and I will be sure to add them. It does not matter if they are an International or someone playing club cricket in Jamaica, I am happy to get them on the list.

And speaking of handles, this was all a cut-and-paste job, so any errors that you might see in handles or names are sics – e-mail your corrections to the cricketer’s PR people.

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Those of you that have read my earlier posts are aware that I like to use something called Tweets per Follower (TPF) to see how effective a Twitter campaign is. Simply put, it is the number of Tweets divided by the number of Followers. It is by no means scientific, but the lower the number, the more effective a campaign is.

For instance, the ECB’s official Twitter feed has a TPF of .05 – which means they are gaining 20 followers for each and every Tweet. Meanwhile, yours truly has a TPF of 9.95 – which means I am gaining one follower for every ten times I Tweet.

Again, presented without comment. It just is what is.

Some of those numbers are jaw-dropping, however. I mean, Virat Kohli gains 1,000 Followers each and every time he Tweets, for instance.

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This was a very time consuming collection of data, but it was a fun exercise nonetheless. While working on the above, I was simultaneously working on a similar post for journalists, bloggers, and media members. It will be a couple weeks before I am able to publish that one – but trust me when I tell you it is going to be fucking fascinating. Seriously.

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While working on this post I also learned how to insert a Google Doc into a WordPress post – so it was all worth it just for that. You can learn how here.