Celbrities Flock to Twitter

Microblogging service Twitter is experiencing growth in a new area: celebrities. Lately, more and more famous figures have been opening accounts, posting updates and, in some cases, even interacting with fans. While some celebrities, such as golfer Natalie Gulbis, use the site for specific communication, others, like basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal use the service much like many of Twitter’s everyday users: to post random and spontaneous updates about their life.

Other celebrities using the service include Jimmy Fallon, who is in preparations to replace Conan O’Brien as the host of NBC’s Late Night, Tyler Perry, Felicia Day of Dr. Horrible/The Guild fame, Juno scribe Diablo Cody, Luke Wilson and MC Hammer. While some are more marketing oriented, clearly geared towards messaging to the public, others are actually quite interesting portals into the lives of their authors.

As a corollary, when MySpace first got started, it was a social network geared towards independent artists to showcase their art, photography and music. Once MySpace started working with popular bands and television studios to promote their content, and users could establish what felt to be a more significant relationship with celebrities they admired by adding them as friends on the service, the site skyrocketed in popularity, leading to it’s acquisition by News Corp. for over $500 million. If Twitter is able to apply the same strategy by recruiting celebs to post on the service, they could see a tremendous amount of growth from users looking to follow their obsessions.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.