Earlier I posted a Tweet encouraging people to ‘follow’ British tennis player Andy Murray. Andy is currently sending Twitter updates from Beijing where he will soon be competing. This prompted Kevin to blog about how Murray was using Twitter to improve his online reputation. However, as I noted in the comments, he’s currently being followed by around 150 people so it’s unlikely to have a major impact on what people think about him, despite the fact that he’s promoting his Twitter account from the homepage of his official site.
This got me thinking about what Twitter will need to do in order to, as Facebook has, go mainstream. It occurred to me that whilst Andy Murray is a well known sportsman, he’s not necessarily the most exciting person in the world and his updates hardly scream ‘read me’. What Twitter needs, I thought, is for someone like Kanye West to start using the service: he’s incredibly popular with a wide range of people, he’s funny, cool, and his blog is well worth reading. If only Kanye started using Twitter — he would put it in front of a much wider audience, which might actually allow Twitter to start properly thinking about how to monetise itself.
A fairly decent theory, and I’d hope you’d agree. But there’s only one problem: Kanye is already using Twitter, and he has even fewer followers than Andy Murray. So why is it that celebrities such as Kanye & Andy can’t push Twitter into the mainstream? Well, I think that there are a number of reasons.
Firstly, there’s promotion. Whilst Murray points to Twitter from his homepage, it’s done from a banner that changes, so not everyone will see the link to Twitter (or the explanation of what it is). And as for Kanye, I scoured his site but couldn’t find anything promoting his Twitter account anywhere. Maybe if he promoted it as much as he does his blog (or even from his blog) he’d have more followers than some spam accounts I’ve seen. To put his 120 odd followers into context, the account for 10 Downing Street has more than 3,000. Tellingly, the Downing Street account is prominently flagged on the Downing Street homepage.
Downing Street also provides another salutary lesson for Murray & Kanye: they’re getting involved in the conversation (I know that conversation is in danger of becoming a meaningless buzzword, but it’s apt in this instance). For example, Downing Street is following over 4,000 people and has 3,696 followers in return (although I’d say they should really aim to have more followers than people they’re following). Also, when people send @ messages to Downing Street they often respond. This means you realise that it’s a real person running the account (although it’s not Gordon Brown actually doing it) and makes it less likely that you ignore their Tweets.
In contrast, Andy Murray is only following one person (his brother Jamie), whilst Kanye isn’t following anyone at all. And looking at their Twitter time lines, it seems like they never engage in conversation, although I’m sure that some people have tried to interact with them. Kanye’s Tweets especially seem to be nothing more than boring publicity messages: compare this with his blog, where he gives a fascinating insight into the people, places, trends, music, etc that inspire him, and it becomes clear why his blog is so popular and his Twitter profile isn’t.
So it seems that Kanye West using Twitter is not going to be enough to make the service more popular. Or at least not whilst his account is in the digital equivalent of an ivory tower, from which his PR people shoot out sales messages. So where does that leave Twitter? What exactly will push the service into the big time? Personally, I think that this might do it – its updates never fail to please.
I’m the SEO & Social Media Director at London-based digital marketing agency Altogether Digital. I also blog here and you can find me on Twitter here.
