Celebrities on Twitter
This is certainly not a celebrity gossip blog, but with all of the buzz lately surrounding celebrities (and their use of Twitter), I couldn’t help but comment on this topic. This video clip from E!’s show “The Soup” pretty much summarizes the past couple weeks (it gave me a good chuckle!):
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iglWyCGFTts
Celebrities are buzzing about Twitter, tweets, and their tweeps – and a huge mainstream audience is flocking to the website in record numbers, as a result. According to Compete, Twitter.com had 14 million unique visitors in March, which is up from 8 million in February 2009. When Oprah (@oprah) joined Twitter recently, she had more than 73,000 followers even before issuing her first tweet. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) also recently beat CNN in a race to be the first Twitter account to reach a million followers.
The question for us in PR is how does this sudden surge in Twitter visitors affect us and our clients? In a nutshell…the more the merrier. The more people sign up, the more varied the interests of the Twitterverse, the more interesting the conversations, and the more opportunities exist for different types of brands to get involved.
At the same time, the more important question over the long-term is whether these numbers can be sustained. Some argue that many of the mainstream consumers that visit Twitter are not sticking around for long. Nielsen reported last week that 60% of users who sign up fail to come back to the site in following months.
Only time will tell whether Twitter has “staying power” among mainstream audiences. For now it’s clear that just as Starbucks (@Starbucks) and Zappos (@zappos) are using Twitter to interact with customers and build their brand, celebrities like Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, and Britney Spears are shooting to accomplish some of these sames goals on Twitter.
[...] notably, Oprah (who hasn’t tweeted since the beginning of June, by the way). I wrote about Hollywood’s use of Twitter back in April, but now the media has been telling a slightly different story – Twitter is leveling [...]