Do You Care About Celebrity Twitterers?

A few weeks ago I read this article about celebrity twitter users, and have been mulling a question over in my head.. do I care about celebrity twitter users?

The answer I keep coming up with is not really. To be honest I don’t really care much about celebrities outside of twitter, although I did see the actor who plays Smash on Friday Night Lights at Whole Foods today and pointed him out to my wife. It seems a lot of them became famous for their work, then being famous becomes their work. Although I’m sure if I was given the comps that they receive, I’d work at being famous also!

My attitude towards twitter has been changing recently, but there are some constants. I really only have two personal rules regarding who I follow.

First, be interesting. I know it sounds straightforward, but you’d be surprised how many celebrities violate this prime directive. The classic celebrity violation is to use twitter solely as another marketing vehicle for your latest single/video/whatever. *cough* Britney *cough*

Second, don’t flood my screen with your tweets. This seems to be a habit from the “Internet Celebrity” as opposed to Hollywood variety. If I frequently log on to twitter and see a screen full of your tweets, I’m going to stop following you. This may be a function of the number of people I follow, which is relatively low at the moment. My theory is that no one is THAT interesting, and all of your noise drowns out the other people I’m following. Robert Scoble was guilty of this violation, so he had to be unfollowed. Seems like a nice guy, but he’s a tweet machine. He should cut back on the coffee.

In addition to my rules, I’d like to see celebrities interacting with other people on twitter but this seems to be a rare occurrence. Since I live in Austin, it’s mandated that we pay attention to Lance Armstrong, but the dude puts out great tweets like “Just off the bike. 70 miles. Windy in austin!!” not exactly engaging. He’s got 5,377 followers but is only following 2 people (one of them is his foundation’s twitter acct, the other is the president of his foundation). Get engaged Lance! I’m sure there are some cyclists out there who would be thrilled to trade cycling related tweets.

Tim Ferris is a little better. I’ve read his book and think he seems like an interesting cat, but come on Tim get a little more involved. Just checked two pages of his twitter history and not one tweet that seemed to be part of a conversation. 8,699 followers yet he’s not following anyone himself.

Ultimately I’ll probably still follow celebrities just out of curiosity, and they’ll probably continue to violate my personal twitter rules. You can view my twitter page at twitter.com/alexanderhill and see which interesting people I’m currently following.

What are your personal rules on twitter? Do you have any? I welcome any and all comments in the comment section below.