Python or phlebotomist? WeFollow captures bizarre Twitter categories

2008 was a breakthrough year for Twitter. It grew 752%, ending the year with 4.43 million unique visitors, up from 500,000 at the start of ’08. This year Twitter is growing at a 1,382% clip and has over seven million unique visitors.

As Twitter explodes around us, have you ever wondered which categories of tagging are most popular?
 
WeFollow.com figures this out, bucketing the most popular Twitter hash tags (#) that people assign themselves. WeFollow can’t tell you how many people have adopted specific tags (as those numbers are constantly in flux), but it can provide some indication of their popularity based on the cumulative number of followers. For example, the # 2 most popular tag is #socialmedia. # 4 is #blogger and #5 is #music.

The WeFollow top 100 tag list is actually pretty straightforward, including things like #news, #politics, #travel, #marketing, #business, #women, #education, #sports, #biking, #art and #photography.

Dig beyond the WeFollow Hot 100 Tag list, however, and some bizarre insights reveal themselves, including:

• There are only 132,679 followers of people who’ve embraced the #sex tag. That’s surprising to me, especially when I found out 457,404 are followers of #zombie. I guess more people have a hunger for human brains than flesh.
• #love is such an omnipresent theme; yet its 108,788 followers fall far short of the 370,126 people who follow #taco tagged people. Ethnic foods are big.
• 56,355 followers of people align with #dopeness, proving how utterly un-hip I am. (What's it mean?) 
• Awesome evidently remains a word-du-jour with the over 185,000 following #awesome and/or #awesomestuff. That’s so awesome.
• There are 92,409 followers of #porn” taggers. Meanwhile #phlebotomist racks-up 424,851. Who knew drawing blood was more popular? 
• #cloudcomputing - one of the current hot tech markets – has 55,319 followers. This may not sound like many, but it is, especially compared with the mere 3,405 who follow people tagged with #drinking. This got me thinking … are more people interested in buying computing resources as an online service than imbibing a glass of pinot noir? 
• #badass yields a disappointing 9,207; meanwhile #python delivers 42,639 people who intentionally choose to follow people affiliated with that noun. I searched and searched, but couldn’t find  #badasspython anywhere on Twitter.

And so it goes.

As Twitter explodes as a social media platform, we’ll continue to gain real time insight into personal branding, with all its idiosyncrasies.

As for me, I’m putting all my money on #hollywood. It’s currently at 55,910 tags, but I have a gut feel it’s going to climb the Twitter charts. After all, #celebrity is # 1 with 13+ million following people this tag.