Obama To Tweet Personally – But Will He Catch Up with Twitter’s First Lady, Gaga?
Obama’s campaign (Obama2012) announced on its website that a new “@BarackObama” would see the President tweeting personally and more regularly. While they now manage his Facebook and Twitter accounts, tweets from Obama will be signed as “-BO.” Whether the President’s efforts to “make the most of these channels” will help his 2012 presidential campaign remains to be seen. The president’s staff just tweeted, “As this campaign ramps up across the country, we want to know: what would you like to see us tweet about?” [Hmm].
For now, let us fly with Twitter’s little blue bird to a brief analysis on the site’s top users, usage, hype and purpose. In case you didn’t know, Ashton Kutcher isn’t Twitter’s king, in spite of well-documented reports on his notable success as a social media star. He isn’t just a pretty face; “aplusk” is also a savvy tech investor, and according to twittercounter.com he does rank four places higher than Oprah. Still, Katy Perry, Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears, respectively, are doing better than him. And above the Oops-I-Did-It-Again singer is President Obama, just below Justin Bieber, who is behind fame monster, Lady Gaga. She has over 11 million followers and follows a little over 140 thousand people.
I, on the other hand, with only 24 (organic) Twitter followers have just about enough time to read some feeds, from the even fewer accounts, to which I subscribe – and this is precisely the reason hundreds come and go, once they see I really don’t have time to ‘follow back’ they are out. I always wonder, though, whether Barack Obama’s staff can actually afford to read tweets from over 600K accounts, which the President claims to follow.
For the Twitter community, the number of followers is an advertising currency and it constitutes ‘open stats’ such as Facebook ‘friends’ and ‘fans’. Celebrities, entrepreneurs, businesses and news agencies primarily use the site to promote products, services and content - potentially reaching millions at a time. But others use Twitter only as a direct source of information, in which case the number of followers or following others might not be that important. If tweets aren’t protected, you can see accounts’ feeds without having to subscribe to them. The rest is PR - and I won’t even talk about buying and selling popularity.
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