Breakdown: How Justin Bieber Is Like Apple

Preface: A viral marketing success

"I wanted to build him up more on YouTube first. We supplied more content. I said: 'Justin, sing like there's no one in the room. But let's not use expensive cameras.' We'll give it to kids, let them do the work, so that they feel like it's theirs."

How the Bieb broke out

• ORGANIC FAME
  Unlike a lot of teen-pop stars, Bieber wasn't pre-fabricated at all: He got his record deal through a series of memorable YouTube videos. Former teen pop stars Justin Timberlake and Usher famously fought to sign him. Usher won.
• VIRAL SUCCESS
  A key part of Bieber's success is his accessibility. His homemade videos had millions of views even before he had an album out, meaning he had a huge built-in base to build from.
• VIRAL REWARDS
  Twitter has only increased Bieber's fame. His latest album, "My World 2.0," has led the Billboard 200 for four of the last eight weeks, and he's had 11 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 (though only one top-10 hit).

Bieber's Twitter popularity

• 23.7 million estimated "Bieber" tweets in the last six months

• 18.1M
  estimated "Justin Bieber" tweets in the same period
• 1.5M
  estimated tweets about his latest album, "My World 2.0"
• .27%
  of all tweets mention Bieber's last name in some way

• » For nerds only: How did we gather the data? Well, we used data from Twitter analytics site Trendistic from November 21, 2009, to May 21, 2010. We extracted said data, converted it to CSV format and did an average in Excel. We then took that average and compared it to a rough per-month average of tweets compiled by Pingdom, taking into account an average of 16 percent of growth in total tweets each month. In the end, though, these are just educated estimates; keep in mind that some days -- say, March 23, when Bieber's "My World 2.0" was released -- might have a higher flow of tweets than others.

Why does "Bieber" trend so often?

• Simple answer: He's a consistent pop-culture topic. Other seemingly popular topics this year, such as Conan O'Brien's departure from late night, Lady Gaga, and the launch of the iPad, seemed inescapable at points. Based on data from Trendistic, Bieber never reached the peaks of any of those, but instead has remained a constant part of the conversation. He never goes away; instead, he just keeps trending.

• 12% the iPad's share of tweets when it was announced

• 3.96%
  Conan's peak share of tweets after he told NBC he wasn't changing his time slot
• 4.02%
  Lady Gaga's share of tweets when a false rumor about her death circulated in January
• .9%
  Justin Bieber's biggest share this year, when he was on "Saturday Night Live"

• » Better points of comparison: Bieber's history on Twitter in recent months best mirrors that of major tech giants, including Google, Facebook and Apple. Not in terms of peaks -- Google last Friday hit a peak of 3 percent of all tweets thanks to their Pac-Man doodle -- but in terms of constant relevance.

Teen pop trumps the news regularly

• What's more important, health care Reform or "One Less Lonely Girl?" It seems obvious, but despite that, the health care debate rarely caught the attention of the public the way that Bieber has, with the bill grabbing the Twitter-geist at just one point – immediately after the bill passed the Senate, where it was around 2 percent of all tweets. How did other big news stories fare against the Bieb? Let's take a look.

• yes
  the Gulf Oil Spill is slowly starting to gain on the teen idol (it took a month)
• no
  the Tea Party's success as a movement can't compete with Bieber's smile
• yes
  the Greek debt crisis was more popular than Bieber -- briefly -- during the "flash crash"

So is Twitter discriminating against the Bieb?

"It is important to note that this new algorithm does not 'block' any topics from trending. If topics you saw regularly in your Trending Topics menu have disappeared or are not showing as consistently as before, do a saved search for them on your homepage. That way, in one click, you can view search results for topics that matter most to you. Also consider localizing your Trending Topics menu."