Canadian teen heartthrob Justin Bieber may not be the king of Twitter but he's staking a claim for the title.
Last week, the 16-year-old pop singer from Stratford, Ont., was the No. 1 most-tweeted about topic, according to the tracking website whatthetrend.com.
This week he fell just short of the top spot and settled for second behind a little event called the Oscars.
As of mid-Friday, Bieber was ranked among the Top 140 most popular Twitter users but his numbers of followers are multiplying.
He averages about 11,000 new followers daily, which on Friday helped him pass the Twitter accounts of the influential tech blogs TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider.
If his Twitter account's growth continues its frenetic pace, which it steadily has for months, he'll likely crack the Top 100 by April.
But it would still take months to approach the Top 10, an elite company of Twitter users with more three million followers, such as Lady Gaga, John Mayer, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, Britney Spears and the top dog, Ashton Kutcher.
Bieber may be far behind that group but he's still a hot topic on Twitter right now, said Ingo Muschenetz of What The Trend.
"He's certainly No. 1 unless something else comes along, like when the earthquake in Haiti happened that took the No. 1 spot for a few weeks," Muschenetz said.
"If it wasn't for the Oscars, he definitely would have been No. 1 (this week)."
Bieber has been on Twitter almost a year but it wasn't until January that his popularity growth really started registering, Muschenetz said.
It helps that he's an engaged user that communicates directly with his legions of fans who tweet him daily.
Bieber's popularity is also buoyed by his detractors who can't stand to see his name on Twitter's list of trending topics over and over again.
"Justin Bieber trends really high and some people love that and some people hate that," Muschenetz said.
"(The haters) then tweet about the fact that he's trending, which only makes him trend higher."
Twitter recently estimated that about 50 million tweets are registered each day, up from the 5,000 daily when the site was in its infancy in 2007.
