Lady Gaga, the most popular person to follow on Twitter

The latest list of the people with the most followers on Twitter has been announced and there has been a change at the top with pop singer Lady Gaga pushing past Justin Bieber and ascending to the top spot with 20 million followers.

The list of the people with the highest number of followers on the micro-blogging site Twitter has been unveiled. At the top of the list is Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) with over 20 million followers. The next places, as noted by Yahoo! News, are taken by Justin Bieber (18 million), Katy Perry (15.7 million), Shakira (14.5 million) and Rihanna (14 million). This means that pop music stars occupy the top five ‘most followed’ category. The remaining top ten, according to Business Insider are: Kim Kardashian, with, 13.6 million; Britney Spears with 13.5 million, Barack Obama, with 12.8 million; Taylor Swift, with 11.4 million; and Selena Gomez, with 10.7 million. The presence of President Obama on the list means that he is the only person outside of the pop singer and celebrity set to feature in the list. According to the BBC, Gaga’s social media fan base is huge. The singer has 48 million fans on Facebook and more than 800,000 "circles" on Google+. To this she will soon add her own social game on Zynga, imaginatively called “GagaVille”. Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta in 1986 in New York. She has sold in excess of 23 million albums worldwide, including “The Fame” (2008), “The Fame Monster” (2009), and “Born This Way” (2011). Although Lady Gaga is big on Twitter, Britney Spears has a bigger following on Google+. Spears recently became the first person to surpass the 2 million followers mark on Google+, according to data from ubergizmo. With the Twitter followers, not only is Lady Gaga number one, she is also the first person to receive over 20 million followers in the history of Twitter. The artist was also the first person to exceed ten million followers on Twitter in May 2011. According to the celebrity gossip site Mr Paparazzi, Twitter has 175 million registered users. This means that almost 9% of Twitter followers are listening to the philosophical musings of Lady Gaga.