10 Top Twitter Users From Barack to Bieber

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Twitter didn't have a big IPO like Facebook (FB) did earlier year and didn't have an Oscar-nominated movie made about it, but at least it's a whole lot less quiet than its status-updating competitor.

Compared with Facebook, Twitter's still a little niche service. It didn't go buy Instagram earlier this year, it didn't throw Zynga (ZNGA) and its FarmVille games under the bus last month over quarterly losses and it doesn't have a whole lot of great, extraneous features that keep changing just as users get used to them. It is, however, growing much faster than Facebook while adapting far better to the mobile world.

According to ComScore (SCOR), Facebook's unique visitor numbers worldwide are still five times that of Twitter. Last month, Twitter ranked behind both Facebook and LinkedIn (LNKD) in the unique visitor rankings and, back in August, was surpassed by Instagram for usage among smartphone users. Twitter's 58% growth in the last year dwarfed Facebook's 4% uptick, though, and may have had a little to do with Facebook picking up the photo and social networking services back in April.

Traffic for Twitter's top users is on the grow as well. In May 2011, Lady Gaga became the first Twitter user to reach 10 million followers Since then, 29 other brands and people joined her ranks. Since August, Instagram, Twitter en espaņol, Adele, Snoop Dogg, Demetria Lovato and Miley Cyrus all eclipsed the 10-million-follower mark. Women dominate the list, accounting for 16 of the Top 30 seven of the top 10. Only four brands -- YouTube, Twitter, Twitter en espaņol and Instagram -- have more than 10 million followers.

To give you some idea of just how large Twitter's Top 1% are living these days, here are the Top 10 Twitter users according to follower numbers compiled by MediaBistro:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... Next › Last »