Celebrities have a lot of followers…but is anyone listening?

Jun 16, 2010 by Dirk Singer

Canadian research firm Sysomos has come out with some interesting, if not that surprising, research about Twitter A-listers and their followers.

That research can be summed up like this:  Celebs might have hundreds of thousands or even 1+ million followers, but that’s very often made up of people who specifically joined Twitter to follow said celeb and have done nothing since.  Hence they are not engaged on Twitter and may in fact be part of the 83% who according to RJ Metrics don’t log into their accounts every month.

That also ties into the recent research that 50% of under 35s re influenced by friends. on social media, but only 17% by celebs

By contrast, people who follow the so-called social media “gurus” are engaged and influential in their own right.   And in the middle, we have people who follow media Twitter accounts.   They are Twitter consumers.  And while they don’t live and breath it, neither have they just checked in to see Ashton Kutcher and checked out again.

The following three tables pretty much say it all:

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