Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Indian Celebs on Twitter - great start but a long way off!


SRK reached more than 10,000 followers in a single day on Twitter (he has more than 40K followers at the time of writing this article). @iamsrk quickly climbed up the twitter vine and perched right at the top just in a day. His first few tweets talked about how he was reluctant to jump on to the twitter world but looked forward to a good time on the site. Twitter, one of the buzz words of 2009, which allows its users to share with the world what they were doing, thinking about, etc. in 140 characters long status message has taken the Indian celebrity world by a storm.
Notably Shashi Tharoor, Gul Panag, Chetan Bhagat, Barkha Dutta, Rajdeep Sardesai have kept the Twitter world abuzz with their 'tweets'. There have been controversies as well, be it Tharoor's remarks about the 'cattle class' or the recent one involving Chetan Bhagat and the makers of the movie 3idiots. What is surprisingly good for the celeb world is the fact that many controversies and news making stories are doing a reverse flip and jumping from the Twitter world to main stream media and not the other way around.
This new media, though very new to India at large, is making inroads into the lives of people in a big way. Twitter addiction is already being talked about in families' dinner tables and many people are using it in a professional way as well (more on this in another article soon!)
There are talks that SRK has jumped into the Twitter world with hopes of promoting his latest flick, "My name is Khan". Though these could just be speculations but there's no denying the fact that no one would want to miss out on this (free) medium of publicity which is promising to be quite powerful as well.
The Indian celebrities are still far behind the rest of the world when it comes to the Twitter-etiquettes though! Very few participate in a 2 way conversation, which makes it look like a tool of one-way-promotion for them. The fans are nevertheless in all frenzy each time they welcome a new Bollywood star to the Twitter vine. But, anyways, as long as these big movie stars appear in my Twitter timeline, who's complaining!

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