Today Oprah tweeted her first tweet, how very mundane.
Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against the lady, but there is something inherently wrong about anyone having over 80,000 followers before they have made a single tweet.
Her followers have just become 150,000 as I write this and she has made a grand total of 6 tweets with only one @reply – if that profile belonged to anyone else they’d rightly be called a spammer.
Of course, this has been a major coupe for her and twitter. She had the internet’s equivalent of a blockbuster by keeping the world waiting for her first tweet. A more successful twitter profile launch the world has yet to see, or do they?
Oprah’s 1st Tweet
So what did all these virtually queing celebrity stalkers get rewarded with as her first tweet?
HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY .
All in caps.
Why So Down On Oprah?
It’s nothing personal and it’s not just Oprah. The proliferation of celebrities and celebrity culture on Twitter does have a negative side to it though. Social Media is just that – social, but there is nothing social about having hundreds of thousands of followers and not interacting with them is anything but social. Broadcast media exists precisely for this purpose. That said some celebrities truly seem to “get” social media, Stephen Fry being the obvious example. He follows many of his followers back and indeed often replies to tweets sent to him. Not a trait that can be viewed on many other celebrity twitterers profiles.