Superstar Amitabh Bachchan reigns as the undisputed Twitter king

Amitabh Bachchan has been crowned the undisputed king of Twitter among his Bollywood counterparts, as per the “Bollywood Twitter Index”, a social media analytics report released by TO THE NEW, a leading digital services ecosystem in India. The report is based on research by ThoughtBuzz, the social media analytics’ arm of TO THE NEW. The Bollywood Twitter Index reveals that Amitabh Bachchan continued to reign over the micro-blogging site with the highest number of followers, clocking a growth of 87% over the last year. He is followed in the list by the Khan-brigade – Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan. Making an appearance at #5, Priyanka Chopra is the only actress in this top five Indian movie celebrities’ list.

Despite gaining the maximum number of followers over the last one year with 151% increase, Bollywood’s Dhak-Dhak girl, Madhuri Dixit narrowly missed making it to the list this year. She was nudged out by the fashionista of B-town, Sonam Kapoor, who hung on to the number 10 position with an 87% increase in followers since last year. Other significant gainers include Akshay Kumar with a 99% increase and Deepika Padukone with an 82% increase in the number of followers over the last year.

It is interesting to note that with virtually no activity in the year, Aamir Khan has continued to gain significant numbers, having amassed nearly 2 lakh new followers in the last 2 months alone. Aamir’s only tweets in the current calendar year are about narration of his experience of meeting David Cameron, Prime Minister of United Kingdom and #ThankYouSachin during the cricketer’s last test match in Mumbai.

The majority of conversations (around 27%) that Bollywood celebrities indulge in are about promoting their work or films. Stars also like to share their personal experiences or interact with their fan base using Twitter, about 24% of the tweets are contributed towards both of these activities. The rest of the Twitterverse discussions are based around promoting their own brands (9%), favourite quotes (7%), opinions about specific issues (6%) and social causes (4%).

Another intriguing fact is that both male and female celebrities equally tweet about their upcoming projects and talk about the social causes they support.

Commenting on the Bollywood Twitter Index, TO THE NEW, Managing Director, Puneet Johar said, “Movie stars have always been held in awe and treated as demi-gods by Indian audiences. The rise in popularity of social media platforms, particularly Twitter, has broken down barriers allowing fans to gain personal access into the lives of the stars that they may never have had the opportunity to interact with otherwise. Bollywood stars, who have taken to micro-blogging to engage with their fans, have gained millions of followers and emerged as powerful social influencers.”

The Bollywood Twitter Index is a social media analytics’ list of popular movie actors in India with most number of followers. The report which is a comparative study of the most active celebrities on Twitter, (based on number of followers and tweets per day) analyzes the Twitter content on the basis of their last 100 tweets during the period ending October 2013.