Twitter is a way for anyone with internet access to let the entire world know about what they are up to in 140 characters or less. As an active Twitter user myself, I find it incredibly interesting to witness it’s growth from relative obscurity to its current status as a viable marketing tool.
After reading Simrat’s blog post about Twitter and Sponsored Tweets, I’d like to extend upon their post because I agree with almost everything they’ve said but I’d like to add my own personal two cents. I started using Twitter because I wanted to “follow” my favourite celebrities. I have a mild celebrity obsession and I do read the trashy tabloids from time to time. I’d like to think of it as a form of escapism.
As much as I’d love to believe that most of the celebrities are on Twitter because they love their fans, to be quite honest there is always an alternate agenda. Perhaps it is the cynic in me, but it is highly unlikely that a celebrity joined Twitter so they can be ‘real life friends’ with all their fans. For example, as much as Justin Bieber professes that he’s on Twitter for the fans to be closer to them, upon closer inspection you can see that he stealthily puts in many different plugs to products he sponsors as well as major promotion of his music.
Sponsored Tweets really hits home how much celebrities can influence consumers to buy material possessions. I really like how Simrat mentioned that when a celebrity tweets about using something as opposed to staring in a commercial for the same thing, the followers feel a more ‘real’ connection to buying the product because it doesn’t seem like the celebrity is being ‘paid’ to advertise but genuinely enjoys using the product.
Another example of Twitter’s influence is KONY 2012. Through the use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter KONY 2012 was able to gain momentum and became a widespread phenomena in just one night. Jennifer‘s blog post I found to be very informative and her inspired comparison of KONY 2012 to the lifecycle of a product I found truly interesting. In fact, her comparison did in fact come to fruition. In the beginning the early adopters (such as the creators of the video) spread it to celebrities who then retweeted the video to their millions of followers which is basically the general population (early/late majority). Invisible Children basically just needed to spread the video to key celebrities (as they identified) and from then it was like a snowball effect gaining more and more momentum. To that effect, the “life” of KONY 2012 to me seems to be very short. At first it was the “in” thing and it was what everyone and everything was talking about – and it seemed that all of a sudden everyone was an expert on KONY 2012 with an opinion and Twitter as their medium to tweet their thoughts. Within hours of its introduction, the video had become a trending topic all around the world and became instantly viral. However, just as quickly as KONY 2012 came into our lives it seems to have exited it just as quickly. Aside from the controversial detainment of co-founder Jason Russell, KONY 2012 seems to have lost its momentum and is no longer the ‘in’ thing. It’s an example like this that shows the volatility of social media sites like Twitter, where popularity can be very fleeting. This is also evidenced in Trending Topics that are constantly changing. Because just like the world, no one dwells on just one topic of conversation, the conversation is always changing and evolving.
