I have come to the conclusion that most of the time I spend on Facebook is a big waste. Other than a few close friends, I am following the lives of people who mean nothing to me. I can’t remember them saying anything of consequence. Twitter is totally different. Most influential people and companies use Twitter to impart information on a much more intellectual basis. They are feeding info as the news develops or are uncovering information that they think will be helpful to the people who follow them. There are still a lot of vanity posts but the 140 character limitation doesn’t allow for much boasting.

The challenging problem is to decide who to follow. From the very beginning I did it all wrong. I followed people who followed me and picked up others who my friends were following. Don’t do what I did. Carefully select folks who can share information that will have some impact on you.
]
Sree Sreenivasan of the tech blog CNET (he us also Chief Digital Officer, professor of digital media, and Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia University) put together a good list of folks and companies who are thought provoking and post frequently.

Top 10 most followed journalists

Anderson Cooper: 3,455,256

Piers Morgan: 3,004,433

Rachel Maddow: 2,434,423

Larry King: 2,319,449

Bill Simmons: 1,931,155

George Stephanopoulos: 1,814,086

Chris Hardwick: 1,757,790

David Gregory: 1,584,068

Sanjay Gupta: 1,567,922

David Pogue: 1,454,191

Top 10 publications with the most journalists on Twitter

The Associated Press: 471

The New York Times: 463

The Wall Street Journal: 327

Bloomberg News: 310

The Guardian: 293

Reuters: 238

USA Today: 186

CNN: 175

Los Angeles Times: 174

Sky News: 141

Top 10 news organizations with the most total followers of all their Tweeting journalists:

CNN: 12,936,330

The New York Times: 10,361,924

ABC News: 8,080,255

NBC News: 4,886,734

The Guardian: 4,653,253

ESPN: 4,468,903

MSNBC: 3,927,080

Fox News: 3,248,385

CNBC: 2,699,308

BBC: 2,136,011