Joyce Meyer and Joel Osteen Dominate Twitter in Retweeting Category
Track Social, a social network analyses platform that keeps track of the current trends on Twitter, has surprisingly found out that two of the most popular brands online are Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer Ministries.
Track Social reported that the top 10 accounts that enjoyed the most retweeted messages are:
1. Joyce Meyer Ministries
2. ESPN
3. Joel Osteen Ministries
4. Miami Heat
5. Breaking News
6. NBA
7. CNN Breaking News
8. Los Angeles Lakers
9. Chicago Bulls
10. BBC Breaking News
The concept of "retweeting" is fairly straight-forward. When an individual posts a message, or a "tweet," it gets sent out to all users who are following his or her Twitter page. Those users then have the option of "retweeting" the message, and sending it out to each of their own followers – who then can do the same thing, and so on. Depending on how many people retweet the message, it has the potential to reach an almost endless network of users.
The results are both surprising and expected, in a way, according to the company. Most of the Twitter accounts are either sports news or sports team websites (all three teams in the top 10 are NBA teams,) which is logical considering the popularity of sports in America and fans' desire to be aware of up-to-date scores and reports.
What might be surprising to some is that two of the top three accounts are belong to some of America's biggest megachurch pastors – Joyce Meyer, a charismatic Christian author and speaker from Fenton, Mont., who has over 700,000 Twitter followers, and Joel Osteen from Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas,who has over 500,000 – but has posted almost six times as many Tweets.
Besides being two of the most retweeted accounts, the pastors are also the top two in terms of degree of responsiveness from the audience – how much their followers interact with them.
A look at the Twitter pages of both Meyer and Osteen reveal them to be rather similar – the pastors post multiple messages a day which offer encouragement, advice, quote parts of the Bible, and sometimes announce events the pastors will be involved in, Track Social revealed.
"Given the lack of proprietary content coming through her feed (there's nothing particularly exclusive about the Psalms), the success of Meyers' Twitter strategy tells us something about the attraction of social media platforms like Twitter. The real power of this technology is to allow a personality (who would otherwise never be able to engage with one of "the masses") to speak directly into a person's daily life," according to a press reelase from the company. Track Social creator Sprokkit suggests that it is mainly the pastors' engaging personality that generates their success on Twitter.
Joyce Meyer currently holds the number one position of overall most popular Twitter account – Osteen comes up at number five, and in between them are sandwiched such media giants as Disney, Facebook and YouTube.