For this week’s blog post, I chose to follow politician Al
Gore and celebrity Jonah Hill on Twitter. To give some background, Gore was our
country’s vice president from 1993 to 2001 and famously lost the 2000
presidential election due to a Supreme Court ruling. As of this post, he has
2,507,401 followers. Conversely, Hill is a movie actor that appears primarily
in comedic films. He has 2,371,109 followers.
Gore spends most of his time tweeting about issues with the
world’s climate. A big champion of our environment, he posted a pair of links
to his personal blog discussing clean coal and the climate crisis. He also
directed his followers to a book on Amazon concerning environmental changes
occurring in the South Pole.
Gore tweeted eight times throughout the week, and one of
those tweets was repeated verbatim two days after it was originally posted. His
account has the feel of one that is run by HootSuite or something similar; it
feels preprogrammed and not very engaging.
Hill’s Twitter account, on the other hand, sounds genuine
and like he is actually doing the tweeting. The number of weekly tweets was not
much different (just 12), but the content was very contrasting. He tweeted
about last weekend’s Emmy Awards twice, wishing two of his friends luck and commenting
on a particular speech. He also gave a couple of music recommendations to his
followers and tweeted a photo from his press tour for his film “21 Jump
Street.”
Hill was not very engaging with his followers, similar to
Gore. There were no “at’s” on his feed, leading me to believe he is not using
Twitter to engage with his fans but rather simply share what is on his mind.
I would encourage both Gore and Hill to become more engaging
on Twitter. Gore is tweeting about a subject a lot of people care about and
holding viable discussions with experts on the issue would add a lot to his
feed. Hill should also spend time responding to his fans. I think people expect
this kind of access now with their favorite entertainers, and they aren’t
getting it from him.
I think it was good you found two people with around the same amount of followers. I think it allowed for you to do a closer comparison. I looked at Al Gore's and I would agree it seems like his Tweets are programed.
ReplyDeleteGreat idea looking at the amount of followers each of them have. That's what I should have done. It allows for a better comparison between the two twitters. It also gives us an idea of how wide their audience is and how much potential they have to affect change. I find it interesting that both have around the same amount of followers. I expected Al Gore to have a lot more. And with a 2.5M followers, you'd expect he'd say something more substantial and firm about environmental issues. Autotweets are the worst. -Laura
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with Laura and Vince, it sort of leveled the playing field by them having the same number of followers. Also, interesting is that they both don't engage very much/at all with their publics. As I read that it struck me as the ultimate in vanity: being a one-way communicator. Again, if we compare social media to a cocktail party who wants to engage with someone who only talks about themself?
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