At school there is always a pecking order. The most popular kids shape the status quo (read: the blind lead the blind), and the rest simply fall into line.
On the school bus, the most senior pupils and prefects sat at the back and nobody complained when they were rowdy.
Twitter feels the same, with many junior narcissists trying to reach the same level as their seniors.
And, like a school rugby match between Paarl Gimnasium and Paarl Boys' High School, it gets brutal.
Now - thanks to Twitter's Analytics tool, which was previously available only to advertisers - we minions can regularly check on how average we really are.
Just like at school, very few of us reach the top of the food chain.
With analytics.twitter.com, we can see how many times a tweet was seen by users, retweeted and "favourited".
We can also learn how many replies there were to the tweet, or the number of times users clicked on the tweet to view more details.
To access the Analytics tool, you need to have had an account for at least two weeks - without it having been suspended or deleted - and the tweets must be in English, French, Spanish or Japanese.
It's all very thrilling, akin to turning heads at a house party.
During a curious moment, a perusal of my personal details showed that perhaps I could hold my own with the cool kids: 49% of my measly 2414 followers (as of August 31) also followed the "cool crowd" of Bonang Matheba, and 44% also followed DJ Fresh and Oprah, 42% Gareth Cliff, 36% Anele Mdoda, and 35% followed Minnie Dlamini and David Kau.
In an even bigger boost to my ego, although most of my followers (52%) were in South Africa, 18% of them in Johannesburg,16% of them lived in the UK, which is probably due to the Manchester United affiliation.
The tool also provides a breakdown of your followers' gender, location, and shared interests, including favoured music genres.
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