Marc Andreessen hasn’t always been so prolific on Twitter.
Though he’s had an account since 2007, it was only last year that the venture capitalist really embraced Twitter as a communication platform. Since then, he’s unleashed a number of epic tweetstorms and his follower count has ballooned from about 37,000 to 377,000, adding an average of about 600 new followers each day.
Andreessen has become so much of a Twitter celebrity that customers of SocialRank, a social media analytics platform, have been using its tools to understand what he does right.
Noticing this pattern, the company got Andreessen’s OK to make @pmarca the default account on SocialRank to demonstrate a new feature called Market Intel, which lets users drill down on a Twitter account’s followers by location, bio keywords, and interests, as well as compare that information against another account.
Using Market Intel, Quartz spent the last week analyzing Andreessen’s followers. Here are a dozen facts about the people who follow him:
A third (135,500) of his followers have not tweeted in the last 90 days. Of them, about 55,500 have never tweeted at all.
Still, he’s got an incredibly influential follower list. There are 2,773 verified accounts among his followers.
There’s plenty of overlap between the followers of Andreessen and those of his partner, Ben Horowitz. But some folks belong firmly to one camp or another.
Those in the tech industry who follow Horowitz but not Andreessen include: Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator; Digg founder Kevin Rose; MySpace founder Tom Anderson; Groupon cofounder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky; David Cohen, founder and managing partner of accelerator TechStars; and Anil Dash, blogger and cofounder and CEO of ThinkUp.
Some media outlets also prefer reading Horowitz’s feed to Andreessen’s, including Fortune, Bloomberg TV, Mashable, and Fast Company’s leadership section.
Those on Team Marc include Twitter cofounder Biz Stone; former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo; Oracle founder and former CEO Larry Ellison; internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee; Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; fellow Twitter investor Chris Sacca; Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen; Guido van Rossum, author of the Python programming language; Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake; Path cofounder Dave Morin; Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity and former head of Google’s driverless car program; and Michael Arrington, investor and Techcrunch founder.
News outlets that tune into Andreessen’s tweets over Horowitz’s include: BuzzFeed, Fast Company, Vice, VentureBeat, CNN Tech, WSJ Markets, and the New York Times’ Upshot.
Horowitz is Andreessen’s sixth “best follower,” which SocialRank defines as a combination of most influential and most engaged. No. 1 is Padmasree Warrior, former chief technology officer and chief strategy officer at Cisco.
It’s also fascinating to compare Andreessen’s followers to his arch rival Bill Gurley, a general partner at Benchmark who’s invested in Uber and Snapchat.
Among those who follow Gurley but not Andreessen are Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates; Twitter cofounder and interim CEO Jack Dorsey; Zappos CEO Tony Tsieh; Pandora founder Tim Westergren; NASA Technology; Snapchat; and a slew of Uber accounts.
Those in the media who follow Gurley instead of Andreessen include Reuters Tech, CNBC’s Fast Money, Bloomberg West, BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow, and 17 Wall Street Journal journalists.
But Team Marc includes Biz Stone; Dave Morin; Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky; LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; Box CEO and cofounder Aaron Levie; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; Randi Zuckerberg, younger sister to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg; and Andre Iguodala, NBA star and budding investor.
The media accounts that follow Andreessen but not Gurley include BuzzFeed, Wired’s GadgetLab, Fast Company, Inc, ReadWrite, NPR’s Planet Money, CNN Tech, 188 accounts affiliated with the Wall Street Journal (including Rupert Murdoch), and 18 Quartz-related accounts. Interestingly enough, Andreessen’s also got the following of two prominent right-wing journalists: Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin.
Lastly, two of Andreessen’s most engaged followers are bots: @RTpmarca and @a16zbot.