PGA Champion Keegan Bradley, a rookie from Jupiter, Florida, posted a score of 8-under par (-8) and won the PGA Championship in a playoff Sunday. At approximately 5 p.m., right around the time he was trying to battle back into contention after a triple bogey on the 15th hole, he had about 6,000 Twitter followers (@Keegan_Bradley).
After Bradley had won the tournament and been able to soak it in a little bit, I went to Twitter.com to “follow” him. I found that over 20,000 people had beaten me to the punch.
Good thing Twitter isn’t golf because Bradley would’ve missed the cut at the PGA with the kind of numbers he’s putting up on Twitter.
Monday at 11 p.m., Bradley had 32,686 followers on his Twitter – a ridiculous increase.
This just shows the power of social networking. 30,000 people can connect with Bradley right after he wins the final major championship of the PGA season. They can all “follow” him in a matter of seconds after winning the playoff and raising the trophy.
While he raised the PGA trophy and smiled for the cameras, he had no idea he was gaining tens of thousands of fans on Twitter.
To map out how massive a jump this is just do the math on how many followers he would have if he kept up this pace the rest of the week. For easy mathematical purposes, let’s round his increase to 25,000 followers in a day (Sunday to Monday).
There are six more days in this week (to get back to Sunday), which would mean he would gain about 150, 000 followers in a week – 300,000 in two weeks, 900,000 in six weeks. He would be at one million followers in two months, six million in a year.
That rapid increase adds up as I’ve explained.
If he’s gunning for the top Twitter pages – Kim Kardashian, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey – he’ll be able to get there easily in two years.
Wowser, right?