Twitter Celebrity
A couple of my colleagues at work have asked what exactly Twitter is. Despite what you might have heard, the television industry isn’t exclusively filled with young, intelligent, technology minded people- I work mostly with people old enough to be my parents, or indeed grandparents… so explaining something like Twitter to them is a struggle.
Me: It’s a bit like MSN
Colleague: You mean Hotmail?
Me: No MSN Messenger, you know ‘Instant Messaging’
Colleague: Like text messaging? But that only works on the phone.
And so on. However, some of my colleagues were under the impression that everyone on Twitter simply a place for bored celebrities, teenaged girls talking about what they had for breakfast. Why would they be interested in that?
Well for starters, I am not aware of any teenaged girls on Twitter talking about their breakfast arrangements… although this could be because I am in my mid 20s and it’s getting to the stage were any interest I display in teenaged girls could be construed as creepy. But the following of celebrities got me thinking, so I took a look at who I follow-on Twitter.
As of 10pm on Thursday 7th May 2009, I am following 57 people, and 86 people follow me. I broke the types of people I follow into 5 groups: people I know in person, people I know online, interesting people, Celebrities, and News feeds.
- 14 people who I have actually met and know in person 16 people I have never personally met, but know online thorough Twitter, or blogging or developers/early adopters of Habari
- 14 people whose work I am interested in- developers like Marco Arment, or Shaun Inman or bloggers like John Gruber
- 10 “Celebrities”, (although I cast the net wide and include people like PZ Mayers, or Dr Ben Goldacre who are unknown to the public but have actually published books. But I am also following genuine celebrities like Rachel Maddow from MSNBC, Simon Mayo from BBC 5 Live and Stephen Fry.
- Finally, I follow 3 news related feeds like headlines from the Media Guardian.
So in my case, the majority I follow either know me in person or at least know who I was if I went up to them in the street and introduced myself. However, the marvellous thing about Twitter is that it can be what you want it to be. If you want to follow every celebrity under the sun, (eg. Jonathan Ross, Demi Moore, Stephen Fry), there you have your very own personal copy of Hello! updated every single day, for free. If this if you’re thing, there is a full list of celebrity Twitter users.
The key to Twitter is that you only follow who you want to hear from. I am repeatedly annoyed by reading self-proclaimed “social media experts” and SEO entrepreneurs who write frequently and at length as to the best way to sell your product on Twitter, and make sweeping statements about how you should use Twitter, (or indeed any other online service). They don’t know, they only know how they want ‘their’ Twitter to be and arrogantly assume you do too. Ignore them, but by the same token I urge you to ignore me as well.
I am have a lot of people following me who are simply trying to sell their product or services. To them, I have expressed myself very clearly:
If you have the words “entrepreneur”, “business”, or “SEO” in your profile… don’t expect me to follow you back. You are not an “Internet Marketing Guru”, or “Social Media expert” you are in-fact a dick. Stop ruining Twitter & fuck off.
As for the “social media experts”, those people who believe they know how the Google algorithm works, and the only way to succeed online is to gain the most followers, friends, hits, comments or whatever… you just don’t get it. When I put something online, like a photo, or a post on this site, or a tweet on Twitter, I obviously hope someone somewhere likes it, entertained but it. But I don’t need thousands of adoring fans, millions of Twitter followers hanging on my every word. I am happy if just one person sees what I do, and it makes them smile… and I don’t really care if that person is just me.