Just how big a crowd can you rally on Twitter in 72 hours?

Just how big a crowd can possibly be rallied via Twitter in 72 hours? The results of an experiment are soon to give an answer.

An online PR and social media agency based in Dublin, Simply Zesty, are using crowdsourcing to create country lists of Twitter users

What started as a small experiment 24 hours ago to use the lists function on Twitter to create county lists in Ireland has now snowballed into projects covering the UK and Ireland.

The company have set a limit of 72 hours per country, to gather as many users as possible.

The idea is to create lists by area that anyone - including marketers - can use and also to produce a map showing which areas are the most active on Twitter.

The experiment started in Ireland on Tuesday morning but within 24 hours was spread to the UK and America, due to apparent “high demand.”

The project aims to show the power of social media and is an example of just how quickly news can spread.

The UK and US experiments have already been picked up on by leading Tech blog,  Techcrunch, which has contributed to the snowball effect.

The project works through crowd-sourcing with people sending a tweet to be included.

Word of mouth is key to the success. To take part is simple and for each country users just have to tweet the following (replacing the place name with their county).

For England, “I want to get listed #TwitterEssex, users need to add themselves here.

“When Twitter lists first launched there was a mixed reaction and some people weren’t too sure if they were useful. We hope we’ve found a great use for them and I can’t wait to see which areas are the most active on Twitter,” said co-founder of Simply Zesty, Lauren Fisher.

“This is a really exciting experiment and we just can’t believe how quickly it’s growing. We never thought that just 24 hours ago we would be doing this in the UK and America.

She added, “It’s certainly putting the new Lists function in Twitter through the paces. We started off doing the Ireland list manually but have now got people working on scripts to help us out a bit!”