3 NBA stars dominate 83% of Twitter followers

Twitter has taken over the national conscience and is the hot topic of conversation. This is certainly true in NBA circles where the Shaq-led twitterevolution now claims 41 verified NBA player accounts according to directory and verification site Sportsin140.com.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review got me thinking about how just how widespread the twitter follower-ship of these athletes might be. HBR's study of 300,000 twitter users found that "the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets". I am fairly sure I am in that 10% btw, since I tweet at least 5 times a day and have a total tweet count of 3,722 since July 08.

The HBR study prompted me to do some quick analysis of the NBA athlete twittersphere.

Here's the results in 140 characters or less:

• There are 41 active NBA athletes verified on twitter
• Those athletes combined have over 2.2m followers
• 3 of them: Shaq, Paul Pierce and Dwight Howard, have 83% of those followers
• Only 13 of the 41 have more then 10k followers
• The Suns and Lakers each have 3 players in the top 13
• 8 NBA teams have no twitter representation
• The Timberwolves lead the league with 5 player-tweeters
• The distribution by position is fairly even with 9 for PF and PG;  8 for SG and C; and 7 for SF
• Mark Madsen has more followers (2,955) then Amare Stoudemire (1,791)
• Chucky Adkins, Rudy Gay and Nate Robinson are the only players with less then 1,000 followers
• Nate Robinson has 636 followers and has never tweeted once
• @Kevin_Love and @JTtheKid are my favorite NBA tweeters

and a visual aid showing the distribution of NBA athlete Twitter followers.

  click to enlarge (that's what he said)