Twitter Celebrities

There are two kinds of very popular people on Twitter. This weeks #followfriday post will cover them both. First you have celebrities and secondly you have information sources. I will start with the latter first since it is the easiest to deal with.

Information sources such as CNN, Smashing Magazine, TechCrunch, BBC, NPR, etc have huge amounts of followers and follow next to no one. This is fine. Their sole purpose is to disseminate information by pimping themselves. Unless you are a noob or a delusional idiot you don’t expect CNN to follow you back and pimp your stories or converse with you about Ted Turner’s personal thoughts.

Now we move on to celebrities. Most twitter celebrities are worthless and shouldn’t be followed as they won’t talk to you hear anymore than they will talk to you in a public restroom. Their sole reason for being on twitter is someone told them it was the new big thing and they just had to do it too. If you look at who most celebrities follow, you will find that they only follow a few other celebrities and talk to or about no one else. Unless you are a fanboy (fangirl) I recommend you don’t bother with these people as they only use Twitter numbers to find out just how popular they are. These are people who just don’t get that social media is about socializing with people. Of course I also have my suspicion that very few of these celebs know what their Tiwtter username is and rely on someone in their agents office to talk to the agents and interns representing other celebrities. If you watch celebs signed to the same agent it sometimes looks like there is one person with multiple computers and a few gadgets talking to himself through half a dozen different celebrity accounts.

While I have said and thoroughly believe most Celebs are worthless and should be avoided unless you want to hear that Oprah got a hug from Whoopi after not having seen each other for so long. There are celebrities who while not as famous are worth following and understand that social media means talking to people, not just other celebrities. Wil Wheaton, for example doesn’t follow a lot of people, but it is obvious he tweets for himself and does interact with people who talk to him. The same can be said for author John Scalzi who only follows one person but has a high percentage of interactive tweets.

While you may never hit the 2000 person following limit, it makes sense to be picky about who you follow. (Actively following 2k+ people is easily accomplished with the group feature in Tweetdeck) There is also some karmic justice in avoiding people who only want to use you as a popularity stat. In the end you can follow anyone you like and if you become popular enough in your own can break the 2k limit, but it is important to remember Social Media is about socializing not just telling the world how narcissistic you are.