Celebs on Twitter still see a one way street?
When Twitter broke the mainstream, Eric Weaver from the Brand Dialogue made a valid observation. When there is finally a chance to interact with their fans in ways unimagined before, celebs in general still don’t want to listen. If you look at the chart of followers vs. following ratio, most hard hitting celebs are following much less than 10% of their audience.
Yet that’s how many Twittering celebrities are using the site: as one more one-way communication channel. Some seem to be taking the time to respond to fans, but most appear very uni-directional.
Is it the inconvenient truth therefore, that when mainstream takes over, the conversation always becomes a one way street?
The one who appear to be responding to fans have probably paid minions to do so. Celebrities, despite what you’d like to believe, don’t really care whether you lived or died.
Agree with the previous post. Minions do the work, make no doubt. It’s a fad for celeb’s at the moment. A private end game to see gets the most.
Agents like it too as it generates publicity, Ashton Kutcher will no doubt have a show coming out of this soon
No one can follow thousands of people and have real, productive conversations with them.
Yes it is true that one cannot follow a lot of peoples and also cannot respond to all followers.
It’s true you can’t genuinely follow and engage with 1000’s of followers – I lose track of the 100 of so I follow – but the act of following is partly symbolic. It shows that you’re at least trying to play the game, even if you don’t reply to every needy follower – or, in fact, ever reply to anyone.
Having said that, I wouldn’t want to click the Follow button 100’s of 1000’s of times ;)
Celebrities stay celebrities because some mass of people are interested in their comings and goings. “Regular” people aren’t celebrities because no one outside their circle of family and friends gives a darn. Just because you find someone interesting enough to follow doesn’t mean you’re interesting enough for them to want to follow you. Twitter is about communication, diversion, having some fun… I seriously doubt that anyone would want to wade through thousands of trying-to-be-clever “tweets” from thousands of unrelated individuals.
Maybe some people don’t agree with the whole idea of Twitter or the internet in general being some “game” of mutual narcissism. If i’m funny/interesting and I tweet and blog mainly for my friends, yet I’ve grown to have a couple hundred followers, all those people are not funny/interesting. I don’t really care about the books they’re reading or the movie they just saw. I don’t even know them. Doesn’t make me a terrible person, it makes me a person using a service who doesn’t want to be bothered by the “noise.” What’s wrong with individuals making choices about who they choose to engage with?